Penguin Modern Classics

The inspiration for the 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