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*THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*

‘A simply wonderful book’ PHILIPPE SANDS

‘Begin Again is that rare thing: an instant classic’ PANKAJ MISHRA

‘Incredibly moving and stirring’ DIANA EVANS

America is at a crossroads.

Drawing insight and inspiration from Baldwin’s writings, Glaude suggests we can find hope and guidance through an era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Seamlessly combining biography with history, memoir and trenchant analysis of our moment, Begin Again bears witness to the difficult truth of race in America. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a more just future.

‘An essayistic marvel . . . deeply personal and yet immensely readable’ SARA COLLINS, GUARDIAN

‘An urgent, deeply interesting book’ RACHEL COOKE, OBSERVER

Winner of the Stowe Prize 2021
Shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2021

Publisher Review

I loved Eddie Glaude's Begin Again. James Baldwin is a man for our moment: in a time of Black Lives Matter we've come to think about our past, our colonial history, enslavement, matters of race and identity. The beauty of this book is not just that it's deeply personal, but that it's also extraordinarily scholarly . . . You're left with an understanding of the extraordinary modernity, relevance and the immense power of James Baldwin. It's a simply wonderful book -- Philippe Sands Begin Again is an essayistic marvel, circling and folding back on itself as Baldwin's musings in the past and Glaude's analysis of the present give meaning to each other . . . a scholarly, deeply personal, and yet immensely readable meditation, a masterful reckoning with the "latest betrayal" of the American ideal -- Sara Collins * Guardian * Timely, powerful . . . Glaude invites us with him to "read Baldwin to the end" and reveals a writer, not spent, but rather illuminating the path beyond despair - the work of a saint if ever there was such a thing -- Ashish Ghadiali * Observer * A call to confront the truth and legacies of the traumatic birth of America . . . urgent . . . original -- Sujit Sivasundaram * History Today, Books of the Year * Begin Again is that rare thing: an instant classic -- Pankaj Mishra, author of The Age of Anger