Reading the 20th Century discussion

Another Country is James Baldwin's first novel since Giovanni's Room. It is a long, passionate, sometimes brutal, often sardonic, always intense book, one of the few novels published in any year that will undoubtedly be remembered long after that year is over.

Another Country is America. The scene is New York—from Greenwich Village to Harlem—and all the places, fashionable and sordid, that lie between. The city looms over the events of a crucial year in the lives of the eight major characters whose tale is told in this remarkable novel. Barriers of sex and colour are torn away; the complexities of love and hate are mercilessly explored—between black and white, between man and woman, between man and man. The power of hate is communicated with a terrifying force. What remains are the shocking truths — the reality of human experience stretched to its limits.

Another Country Is born out of intense fury, rage and, above all, compassion, and it concerns timeless questions that demand explanations from a society which at times seems to insist that there is no hope.