Richard Yarborough (Editor)

Sarah Phillips

This novel, in the words of its title character, is set in "the hermetic world of the old-fashioned black bourgeoisie--a group largely unknown to other Americans, which has carried on with cautious pomp for years in eastern cities and suburbs, using its considerable funds to attempt poignant imitations of high society, acting with genuine gallantry in the struggle for civil rights, and finally producing a generation of children educated in newly integrated schools and impatient to escape the outworn rituals of their parents."

"Andrea Lee's authority as a writer comes of an unstinting honesty and a style at once simple and yet luminous." --Susan Richards Shrove, The New York Tines Book Review

"[Lee] seizes words and orders phrases with that appearance of effortlessness which always characterizes virtuosity." --Jonathan Penner, Washington Post Book World.

Andrea Lee's first book, Russian Journal, was nominated for a National Book Award and received the 1984 Jean Stein Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Cover illustration by Michael McCurdy