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If Beale Street Could Talk

James Baldwin author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd

Published:29th Sep '94

Should be back in stock very soon

If Beale Street Could Talk cover

'Achingly beautiful' Guardian

Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin's novel is Tish nineteen, and pregnant. Her lover Fonny, father of her child, is in jail accused of rape. Flashbacks from their love affair are woven into the compelling struggle of two families to win justice for Fonny. To this love story James Baldwin brings a spare and impassioned intensity, charging it with universal resonance and power.

'If Beale Street Could Talk affirms not only love between a man and a woman, but love of a type that is dealt with only rarely in contemporary fiction - that between members of a family' Joyce Carol Oates

The inspiration for Oscar award-winning film

If Beale Street Could Talk affirms not only love between a man and a woman, but love of a type that is dealt with only rarely in contemporary fiction - that between members of a family -- Joyce Carol Oates
Soulful . . . Racial injustice may flatten "the black experience" into one single, fearful, constantly undermined way of life-but black life, black love, is so much larger than that . . . It's one of the signature lessons of Baldwin's work that blackness contains multitudes * Vanity Fair *
Truth-telling, witness bearing, soul stirring writing -- Cornel West
The spirit of Jimmy's work is of a high moral prophetic vision -- Amriri Baraka
One of the few essential novelists of our time * New Statesman *

ISBN: 9780140187977

Dimensions: 196mm x 128mm x 11mm

Weight: 147g

192 pages