"Danzy Senna's You Are Free is now available for the first time in audio!
Each of these eight remarkable stories by Danzy Senna tightrope-walks tantalizingly, sometimes frighteningly, between defined states: life with and without mates and children, the familiar if constraining reference points provided by race, class, and gender. Tensions arise between a biracial couple when their son is admitted to the private school where they'd applied on a lark. A new mother hosts an old friend, still single, and discovers how each of them pities-and envies- the other. A young woman responds to an adoptee in search of her birth mother, knowing it is not she.
Audiobook Table of Contents:
Admission, read by Adenrele Ojo
The Land of Beulah, read by January LaVoy
Replacement Theory, read by Cassandra Campbell
There, There, read by Bahni Turpin
The Care of the Self, read by January LaVoy
You Are Free, read by Cassandra Campbell
Triptych, read by Adenrele Ojo
What's the Matter with Helga and Dave?, read by Bahni Turpin"
"Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, VOGUE, TIME MAGAZINE, NPR and THE ROOT
'[A] cutting take on race and class...part dark comedy, part surreal morality tale. Disturbing and delicious.' -People
'You'll gulp Senna's novel in a single sitting-but then mull over it for days." -Entertainment Weekly
From the bestselling author of Caucasia and Colored Television, a subversive and engrossing novel of race, class and manners in contemporary America.
As the twentieth century draws to a close, Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible. She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They are the perfect couple, 'King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom.' Their skin is the same shade of beige. They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn, where Khalil is riding the wave of the first dot-com boom and Maria is plugging away at her dissertation, on the Jonestown massacre. They've even landed a starring role in a documentary about 'new people' like them, who are blurring the old boundaries as a brave new era dawns. Everything Maria knows she should want lies before her-yet she can't stop daydreaming about another man, a poet she barely knows. As fantasy escalates to fixation, it dredges up secrets from the past and threatens to unravel not only Maria's perfect new life but her very persona.
Heartbreaking and darkly comic, New People is a bold and unfettered page-turner that challenges our every assumption about how we define one another, and ourselves."
Join our community for the latest bookish news, reading recommendations, exclusive opening extracts, author events and competitions. It\'s all free. And enter a monthly draw to win a £50 Gift Card. See past winners here
