The Narrows

Virago Modern Classics

By: Ann Petry

Narrated by: Jeannette Robinson

Length: 20 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

By the best-selling author of The Street.

With a new introduction by Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie.

It's Saturday, past midnight and thick fog rolls in from the river like smoke. Link Williams is standing on the dock when he hears quick footsteps approaching and the gasp of a woman too terrified to scream. After chasing off her pursuer, he takes the woman to a nearby bar to calm her nerves, and as they enter, it's as if the oxygen has left the room: they, and the other patrons, see in the dim light that he's Black and she's white.

Link is a brilliant Dartmouth graduate, former athlete and soldier who, because of the lack of opportunities available to him, tends bar; Camilo is a wealthy, married heiress who has crossed the town's racial divide to relieve the tedium of her privileged life. Brought together by chance, Link and Camilo draw each other into furtive encounters that violate the rigid and uncompromising social codes of their times.

©1953 Ann Petry (P)1953 Hachette Audio UK

Critic reviews

"Petry is the writer we have been waiting for, hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment, while also offering a page-turning good time. Ann Petry, the woman, had it all, and so does her insightful, prescient and unputdownable prose.... The Narrows is the story of a doomed interracial romance that proves that passion and prejudice are not mutually exclusive." (Tayari Jones, New York Times)

"Petry is the writer we have been waiting for, hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment...insightful, prescient and unputdownable.... The Narrows is the story of an interracial romance that proves that passion and prejudice are not mutually exclusive." (Tayari Jones)

"Her work endures not only because it illuminates reality, but because it harnesses the power of fiction to supplant it." (Parul Sehgal, New York Times)

"The Street and The Narrows are masterpieces of social realism.... [Petry's] writing transcends comparisons. It's volatile but exacting, heartbreaking but often brutally funny. Labels don't stick to it." (Wall Street Journal)