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Just Above My Head

by James Baldwin

Family, faith, and Black life in Harlem

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Awards & Recognition

  • Critical praise

    Praise from The New York Times Book Review

    The review describes the novel as “the work of a born storyteller at the height of his powers.”

AlbakiReads Editorial

Family, faith, and Black life in Harlem

A brother’s grief provides the opening frame for a novel centered on gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family. Set against Harlem and linked to the church world of Baldwin’s earlier fiction, the story brings intimate family and romantic relationships into contact with the wider history of Black struggle in the United States. Its subject matter spans faith, love, anger, responsibility, and loss, giving personal experience and social history equal weight. The result is a family saga shaped by both the bonds between its characters and the pressures of the world around them.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in family sagas and stories shaped by grief and responsibility
  • Readers seeking fiction about Harlem, gospel music, and church life
  • Readers interested in Black history and social struggle in the United States

Themes

Family and griefFaith and church lifeLove and angerBlack struggle and social historyResponsibility

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

James Baldwin's final novel is "the work of a born storyteller at the height of his powers" (The New York Times Book Review).

"Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again."

The stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this stunning, unforgettable novel. Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, James Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the forbidden passion of Giovanni's Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work. Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses--and a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land.
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