Description
In the bustling port city of Marseilles, an African-American banjo player known as Banjo drifts through the streets with a musician’s dream—hoping to form a band while surviving day to day amid shifting fortunes. Across a series of encounters and conversations, he and the other beach boys navigate the international currents of the docks, taking odd jobs and improvising their lives as opportunity and danger trade places. As romance and ambition flare and fade, the group’s fragile bonds begin to fracture, revealing how quickly community can dissolve when each person must choose a path for survival. Written with Claude McKay’s lyrical immediacy and Caryl Phillips’s keen attention to voice and displacement, this novel explores migration, labor, identity, and the restless hope that music can offer in a world built to move on without you.
Available Editions
paperback
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich
Published Jan 1, 1970
326 pages
ISBN: 0156106752
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Details
First Published
1929
Language
eng
Content Warnings
Content and trigger warnings for Banjo by Claude McKay.