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.

Author Biography

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including 'We Were the Mulvaneys', which was an Oprah Book Club Choice, and 'Blonde', which was nominated for the National Book Award. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.