If Beale Street Could Talk cover art

If Beale Street Could Talk

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

If Beale Street Could Talk

By: James Baldwin
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

The inspiration for the film from Oscar award-winning director Barry Jenkins

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?

©1974 James Baldwin (P)2024 Penguin Audio African American Classics Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction World Literature New York

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The First Ladies cover art
All That We've Got cover art
Their Eyes Were Watching God cover art
Beloved cover art
All About Love cover art
The Wretched of the Earth cover art
The Autobiography of Malcolm X cover art

Critic reviews

'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)

'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)

'Truth-telling, witness bearing, soul stirring writing.' (Cornel West)
All stars
Most relevant
We don’t know if Fonny ever made it out free, they almost had the bail money. Frank gives up and dies, they have a beautiful love story. I suppose it was teased when Sharon said that they will be an ending, it might not be always happy but they’ll be an ending, the only certainty is that Tish will deliver the baby that was a beautiful outcome of their love story

We didn’t get a happy ending, in fact the ending was up in the air

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
James Baldwin has such an amazing talent for ripping your heart out and putting it on a beautiful platter and painting the most stunning still life with it. He does the most beautiful and gut wrenchingly beautiful love stories that are so painfully realistic. Baldwin forces us to remember that love does not exist in a vacuum as much as we may wish that to be the case. In fact society and systemic oppression is the 3rd partner in all our relationships and it’s up to us to love beyond that obstacle….

Baldwin does it again

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.