Mixed Race Studies

A Feather on the Breath of God: A Novel

Picador
2005 (Originally published in 1995)
192 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9780312422738; ISBN10: 0312422733

Sigrid Nunez

A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, she escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents’ stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning, homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet—these are the elements that shape the young woman’s imagination and her sexuality. It is a story about displacement and loss, and about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love.

Half-Blood Blues

Picador (an imprint of Macmillan)
2011-09-03
304 pages
8.5 X 5.5 X 0.9 in
Cloth ISBN:9780887627415
Paperback ISBN: ISBN: 9781250012708

Esi Edugyan

• Winner of the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Paris, 1940.  A brilliant jazz musician, Hiero, is arrested by the Nazis and never heard from again.  He is twenty years old.  He is a German citizen.  And he is black.

Fifty years later, his friend and fellow musician, Sid, must relive that unforgettable time, revealing the friendships, love affairs and treacheries that sealed Hiero’s fate.  From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of  Paris—where the legendary Louis Armstrong makes an appearance—Sid, with his distinctive and rhythmic German-American slang, leads the reader through a fascinating world alive with passion, music and the spirit of resistance.

Half-Blood Blues, the second novel by an exceptionally talented young writer, is an entrancing, electric story about jazz, race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves, and demand of others, in the name of art.

The Professor’s Daughter: A Novel

Picador an Imprint of Macmillan
January 2006
288 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-312-42568-5, ISBN10: 0-312-42568-6

Emily Raboteau, Associate Professor of English
The City College of New York

“My father is black and my mother is white and my brother is a vegetable.” When Emma Boudreaux’s older brother winds up in a coma after a freak accident, she loses her compass: only Bernie was able to navigate—if not always diplomatically—the terrain of their biracial identity. And although her father and brother are bound by a haunting past that Emma slowly uncovers, she sees that she might just escape.

In exhilarating prose, The Professor’s Daughter traces the borderlands of race and family, contested territory that gives rise to rage, confusion, madness, and invisibility. This astonishingly original voice surges with energy and purpose.

Red Dust Road: An Autobiographical Journey

Picador an Imprint of PanMacmillan
2010-06-04
304 pages
214mm x 135mm, 0.43 kg
ISBN: 9780330451055

Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing
Newcastle University

‘What makes us who we are? My adoption is a story that has happened to me. I couldn’t make it up.’

From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, the journey that Jackie Kay undertakes in Red Dust Road is full of unexpected twists, turns and deep emotions.

In a book shining with warmth, humour and compassion, she discovers that inheritance is about much more than genes: that we are shaped by songs as much as by cells, and that our internal landscapes are as important as those through which we move.

Taking the reader from Glasgow to Lagos and beyond, Red Dust Road is revelatory, redemptive and courageous, unique in its voice and universal in its reach. It is a heart-stopping story of parents and siblings, friends and strangers, belonging and beliefs, biology and destiny, and love.