Giovanni's Room

Brutally short and impossible to forget. Baldwin writes about love and cowardice in a way that makes cowardice feel like the original sin — not the failure of loving, but the failure of admitting you do. The prose is clean and absolutely unforgiving. A book about self-deception that doesn't let you be self-deceived while reading it.

a passage

“People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away.”