Push

Push is the debut novel of the American writer Sapphire, published in 1996. It is set in Harlem, New York, in 1987.

Precious Jones is sixteen, obese and illiterate, and she lives with her abusive mother, Mary. She is a few months pregnant with her second child, having been raped by her father Carl, who is also the father of her first child, a girl who has Down syndrome. When her school finds out about the pregnancy, the decision is made to send her to an alternative school; Precious is furious, but a counsellor visits her home and persuades her to enrol at the Higher Education Alternative Each One Teach One school in the Hotel Theresa, against her mother's insistence that she should apply for welfare instead. There she meets her teacher, Ms Blu Rain, and a group of fellow students, and the novel follows her through the beginning of her education as she learns to read and to write, and through what that changes about the way she sees herself and what has happened to her.

Sapphire wrote the book as her first novel, and it is told from inside Precious's own point of view.