The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation’

James Baldwin’s impassioned plea to ‘end the racial nightmare’ in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and giving voice to the emerging civil rights movement. Told in the form of two intensely personal ‘letters’, The Fire Next Time is at once a powerful evocation of Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice.

‘Sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle … all presented in searing, brilliant prose’ The New York Times Book Review

‘Baldwin writes with great passion … it reeks of truth, as the ghettoes of New York and London, Chicago and Manchester reek of our hypocrisy’ Sunday Times

‘The great poet-prophet of the civil rights movement … his seminal work’ Guardian