Passing

Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry are light-skinned Black women in 1920s Harlem. A chance reunion draws the stable, respectable Irene into the electrifying and perilous world of Clare, who is living fully as a white woman and married to a racist husband. The novel builds a tense psychological portrait of jealousy, forbidden desire, boundaries of race and class, and the true cost of denied identity.