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‘Everyone’s life begins on a level where races, armies, and churches stop. And yet everyone’s life is always shaped by races, churches, and armies’

In these eight extraordinary stories of love, conflict, desperation and fear, James Baldwin shows people trapped by the roles they must play in society, and those who try and escape them.

From the child in ‘The Rockpile’ whose God-fearing father will not forgive his illegitimacy, to the adolescent who hides his sexuality from his community in ‘The Outing’, and from the down-and-out jazz pianist recovering from addiction in ‘Sonny’s Blues’ to the chilling initiation of a racist in ‘Going to Meet the Man’, these tales, first published in 1965, explore the subtle and profound wounds that discrimination leaves – both in its victims and its perpetrators.

‘He uses words as the sea uses waves’ Langston Hughes

‘Few, it seems to me, have driven their words with such passion’ Guardian