Faces in the Crowd

A woman's marriage unravels as she navigates a crisis of identity while raising her children; her past self is revealed through letters to an obscure poet whose own tragic story (a 1920s Harlem Renaissance figure) runs parallel and converges with hers. The dual-timeline structure, the blending of personal memoir with literary history, and the meditation on language across borders make it a literary/contemporary fiction hybrid rather than genre fiction.