Kirjahaku

The crowded joys and familiar despair of poor, back-alley life in 1950 Pittsburgh have a hold on most people there, but there are those who need to escape. Jeremiah Henderson and his woman, Willet Mercer, set their sights on New York City - but making good is easier said than done. Left with no choice but to give in to the pimp who'd like to try Willet on for size before selling her to his clientele, Jeremiah and Willet try to focus on the future. But just before the pimp has his way with her, Willet balks, stabbing him to death in the back of his car. Horrified, but, nonetheless now flush with the pimp's fat wad and fancy Buick, it looks as if they may be in sight of their dreams; they just have to make one last stop outside Wilmington, North Carolina, where Willet intends to see the little boy she abandoned long ago.

In the small Mississippi town of Banes in 1938, time passes slowly and the town's inhabitants follow the same daily rhythm as they have done for years.

Albert French lights up the monstrous face of American racism in this harrowing tale of ten-year-old Billy Lee Turner, who is convicted and executed for murdering a white girl in Banes County, Mississippi, in 1937. Constructed in a series of powerfully lean vignettes, Billy is a tour de force of dramatic compression, focusing on how this outrageous event affects an entire community. The high-spirited Billy, his mysterious and passionate mother, Cinder, and his friend Gumpy are realized with depth and authority. Told in classic, unrelieved terms yet with remarkable compassion and restraint, their story is an unsentimental and ultimately heart-rending vision of racial injustice. "A work of art . . . Billy never lets up, not for a minute . . . The images rush straight to your brain. . . . Magnificient."--Bill McKibben, New York Daily News "Althought I only knew Billy Lee Turner for an all too brief 214 pages, I will mourn his death for the rest of my life. That's how powerfully and dramatically written this book is."--Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land "Billy's strength is not strictly as a novel; it lives as theater. It is a folk opera that . . . moves with unfaltering pace to its shattering climax."--New York Newsday

Holly is the story of a poor, white girl in 1944 North Carolina, whose lonely world is transformed by a handsome, educated black soldier from the war - and of the town's savage response to their romance. An indictment, a love story, and evocation of a time and place, it confirms Albert French as a dark and passionate chronicler of American mores and culture

Narrated in the rich accents of the American South, Billy's story is told amid the picking fields and town streets, the heat, dust and poverty of the region in the time of the Depression. 'Billy is a book that will stay with me in my dreams', Tim O'Brien author of The Things They Carried