If Beale Street Could Talk
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4.5 • 18 Ratings
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
The inspiration for the film from Oscar award-winning director Barry Jenkins
'Achingly beautiful' Guardian
Harlem in the 1970s: the black soul of New York City. Tish is nineteen and the man she loves - her lifelong friend and the father of her unborn child - has been jailed for a crime he did not commit. As their families come together to fight for his freedom, will their love be enough?
'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
'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
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
If Beale Street Could Talk seems made for the Black Lives Matter age—but James Baldwin published this powerful novel in 1974. After aspiring sculptor Fonny is falsely imprisoned on a rape charge, his pregnant girlfriend Tish and her family battle a racist police force, a hostile judicial system, and a host of other indifferent people to free him. Baldwin delivers this anguished story in gorgeous, poetic language that ennobles his characters and their struggle. We can’t wait to see the film by Barry Jenkins, director of the beautifully devastating Moonlight.
