Another Country

Another Country is a novel by the American writer James Baldwin, published in 1962. It is set mainly in Greenwich Village, Harlem and France at the end of the 1950s, and it was written over more than a decade in New York, Paris and Istanbul.

The book begins with the suicide of Rufus Scott, a Black jazz musician whose relationship with a white woman from the South has destroyed whatever stability he had, and it then follows the people who knew him. Baldwin moves between several of them, and through their affairs, friendships and marriages he portrays things that were not much written about in American fiction of the period: homosexuality and bisexuality, interracial relationships, addiction and extramarital affairs, and the way racism shapes the private life of everyone caught in it. Baldwin had returned to the United States in the late 1950s and was active in reporting on the civil rights movement, and he said that he wanted to write about relationships that went deeper than the idea of brotherly love on offer in the politics of the time.

The novel's method is a third-person narration that stays close to whichever character it follows, so the reader experiences the same events and the same city from several social positions in turn.