If Beale Street Could Talk (Vintage International)

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