First Light

At once a gripping thriller and a heartbreaking elegy, this is Toni Cade Bambara's powerful final testament, a hymn to Atlanta's missing children.

Zala Spencer is barely surviving on the margins of Atlanta's booming economy when she awakens one summer's morning in 1980 to find her teenage son, Sonny, has disappeared. Edited by Toni Morrison as part of Bambara's final novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child, this slim masterpiece leaves us with an enduring and revelatory chronicle of an American nightmare.

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days