Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters...

The life of a thirteen-year-old Harlem black boy on his way to becoming a confirmed heroin addict is seen from his viewpoint and from that of several people around him.

"First there is a battlefield, a pressure-cooker, a time-bomb: the destructive potential that exists in racial bigotry, in color prejudice and in the tensions and sensitivities which such attitudes encourage. Woven into this pattern of violence, there is a theme that is gentle, wistful and poetic: this is Baldwin's apologia for homosexual love."

This sprawling drama traces the passage of three individuals through the events of the nineteen-fifties, sixties, and seventies from the Apollo in Harlem to the Olympia in Paris. Love and courage bind a former child evangelist, a famous gospel singer, and the latter's manager-brother.