Giovanni's Room

Published in 1956, James Baldwin's second novel is a spare, devastating story of desire and denial set among American expatriates in 1950s Paris. Its narrator, David, opens the book alone in a house in the south of France on the eve of what he calls the most terrible morning of his life, looking back on how he arrived there.

With his girlfriend Hella away in Spain weighing his marriage proposal, David drifts into the Parisian bar scene and meets Giovanni, a proud, passionate Italian bartender. The two fall into an intense affair and share Giovanni's cramped room, but David is unable to accept his own desire — clinging to the safety and respectability of his life with Hella even as it destroys the man who loves him.

A landmark of twentieth-century literature and of queer fiction, Giovanni's Room is remarkable both for what Baldwin dared to write in 1956 and for the precision of its prose. It is a searching meditation on shame, masculinity, and the self-betrayal that comes from refusing to be who you are.