Published in 1962, this is an emotionally intense novel of love, hatred, race and liberal America in the 1960s. Set in Greenwhich Village, Harlem and France, ANOTHER COUNTRY tells the story of the suicide of jazz-musician Rufus Scott and the friends who search for an understanding of his life and death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way.
They’re coloured and I’m white but the same things have happened, really the same things, and how can I make them know that?’ ‘But they didn’t,’ she said, ‘happen to you because you were white. They just happened. But what happens up here’ – and the cab came out of the park; she stretched her hands, inviting him to look – ‘happens because they are coloured. And that makes a difference