Because It Is Bitter, and My Heart

Joyce Carol Oates adds to her extraordinary body of work with this stunning National Book Award Finalist filled with violence, love, racism, and a shared secret in mid-century New York. In the early 1950s in an industrial town, racial boundaries may keep people apart-or bring them together explosively. Iris Courtney, who is white, is the only witness when handsome Jinx Fairchild, a black basketball player, kills a white man in order to protect her. The secret link between Iris and Jinx is not only their attraction to each other, but a bond of passion and guilt that has formed between them. This one irrevocable, tragic act shapes their lives and alters their destinies in Joyce Carol Oates's finest, emotion-packed novel-a work critics call a masterpiece, the best work of America's best writer of contemporary realism.

Iris Courtney, a young white woman living in upstate New York in the decade prior to the Civil rights movement, begins a clandestine relationship with Jinx Fairchild, a black man who had defended her in a fatal street fight with a white man