Author(s): Joyce Carol Oates

Fiction

This book presents a controversial, painfully intimate depiction of race in America by the esteemed author of We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde and The Falls. Fifteen years after the mysterious death of Minette Swift - a 19-year-old black girl enrolled as a scholarship student in an exclusive liberal arts college - her former roommate, Genna begins an unofficial enquiry into the traumatic event. In reconstructing the girls' tumultuous freshman year at the college, Genna is lead also to reconstruct her life as the daughter of a famous 'radical-hippie-lawyer' of the 1960s among whose clients were anti-Vietnam War protestors wanted by the F.B.I. What follows is a gripping, painful, and intimate depiction of 'black' and 'white' in America in the years of crisis following the end of the Vietnam War and the ignominious exposure and fall of President Richard Nixon.

First published 2006.