If Beale Street Could Talk

Bol Partner

The inspiration for the new film from Oscar award-winning director Barry Jenkins 'Achingly beautiful' Guardian Harlem in the 1970s: the black soul of New York City. Tish is nineteen and the man she loves - her lifelong friend and the father of her unborn child - has been jailed for a crime he did not commit. As their families come together to fight for his freedom, will their love be enough? 'Soulful . . . Racial injustice may flatten the black experience into one single, fearful, constantly undermined way of life - but black life, black love, is so much larger than that . . . It's one of the signature lessons of Baldwin's work that blackness contains multitudes' Vanity Fair 'If Beale Street Could Talk affirms not only love between a man and a woman, but love of a type that is dealt with only rarely in contemporary fiction - that between members of a family' Joyce Carol Oates

Bol

We are in Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin's novel is Tish nineteen, and pregnant. Her lover Fonny, father of her child, is in jail accused of rape. Flashbacks from their love affair are woven into the compelling struggle of two families to win justice for Fonny. To this love story James Baldwin brings a spare and impassioned intensity, charging it with universal resonance and power.