Description
The electrifying first novel from James Baldwin, whose life and words are immortalized in the Oscar-nominated film I Am Not Your Negro
‘I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal with my father.’
Drawing on James Baldwin’s own boyhood in a religious community in 1930s Harlem, his first novel tells the story of young Johnny Grimes. Johnny is destined to become a preacher like his father, Gabriel, at the Temple of the Fire Baptized, where the church swells with song and it is as if ‘the Holy Ghost were riding on the air’. But he feels only scalding hatred for Gabriel, whose fear and fanaticism lead him to abuse his family. Johnny vows that, for him, things will be different. This blazing tale is full of passion and guilt, of secret sinners and prayers singing on the wind.
‘A beautiful, enduring, spirtual song of a novel’ Andrew O’Hagan
‘With vivid imagery, with lavish attention to details, Mr. Baldwin has told his feverish story’ The New York Times
Review
Something in his prose hit me, almost winding me with its intensity. I’d never read a novel that described loneliness and desire with such burning eloquence.
— Douglas Field ― Guardian
It broke my heart and made me want to jump up and down, unable to fully articulate my own response towards it … [A] notion of a shared humanity consumed Baldwin, and infused everything he did and wrote. Deprived of heritage and history, he borrowed freely and created his own unique language, with the cadences of the Bible and of jazz and Negro spirituals, and inflections of James, Dickens and Shakespeare … This should, like J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, have been crowned as the Great American Novel. — Azar Nafisi ― Independent
A distinctive book, both realistic and brutal … A novel of extraordinary poetry. ― Chicago Tribune
About the Author
Born in 1924 in New York City, James Baldwin published the 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, going on to garner acclaim for his insights on race, spirituality and humanity.
Other novels included Giovanni’s Room, Another Country and Just Above My Head as well as essay works like Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time. Having lived in France, he died on December 1, 1987 in Saint-Paul de Vence.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT is the author of Breath, Eyes, Memory; Krik? Krak!; The Farming of Bones; and Behind the Mountains, a young adult novel; The Dew Breaker and Anacaona. She is also the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States and The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.