Giovanni's Room cover art

Giovanni's Room

A Novel

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About this listen

James Baldwin's groundbreaking novel with a new introduction.

Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin's classic narrative delves into the mystery of love and tells a deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
African American Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Heartfelt

Critic reviews

"If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one."
--Michael Ondaatje

"A young American involved with both a woman and a man...Baldwin writes of these matters with unusual candor and yet with such dignity and intensity."
--The New York Times

"Absorbing...[with] immediate emotional impact."
--The Washington Post

"Mr. Baldwin has taken a very special theme and treated it with great artistry and restraint."
--Saturday Review

"Exciting...a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction."
--The Atlantic

"Violent, excruciating beauty."
--San Francisco Chronicle
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