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‘Jefferson’s eye for details yields some devastatingly honest and painful insights’ The Times

‘Captivating… Charm is this book’s watchword’ Colin Grant, Guardian

The daughter of a successful paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, Margo Jefferson spent her childhood among Chicago’s black elite. She calls this society ‘Negroland’: ‘a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty’. With privilege came expectation.

Reckoning with the limits and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments – the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America – Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions.

Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

‘Negroland is a sharp-eyed cultural commentary on an era of America that has often been too simply told’ Aminatta Forna, Guardian

‘Jefferson writes with piercing clarity of a childhood which was full of love and opportunity at home, but also saturated by contradictions, confusions and a racism which corrodes, like rust, to the heart’s core’ Observer

‘Utterly compelling… A remarkable achievement’ Sunday Times