Passing

When childhood friends Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield come across each other at a white-only restaurant, Irene learns her estranged friend has severed all ties to their African American community and is now married to a bigoted white man unaware of her heritage. Swinging between allure and repulsion, their revived relationship becomes a stage upon which questions of identity, sexuality, belonging, and self-invention play out.

Abrim with stifled desires, Nella Larsen's searing portrait of these women's inner cadences straddles the edges of things--communities, identities, races, and speech--and ultimately lands somewhere absolute and subversive: a place that defies categorization.