Review of "If Beale Street Could Talk" by James Baldwin

Surprisingly I'd never read any of James Baldwin's fiction before, just a few political essays. I had seen the film that was made from the book, so I sort of knew what the plot and the tone would be. But even so I was bowled over by how good it was. The writing is beautiful, the narrative structure is clever, and it doesn't jar at all that the first-person narrator is a young heterosexual woman, even though the author is a gay man. It's about racism of course, and the way in which the system - including "justice" and the labour market, and the housing market, treat Black people, but it's also about love and sex, and he makes a really good job of that.

It's not long but it took me quite a while to read, because I wanted to savour each passage.