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You Have to Read This!: James Baldwin's ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’

May 29, 2026

A book to give you hope: Folio's CEO Joanna Reynolds says there is so much to love about James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk.

1. It's a wonderful life

There is so much love in this book: between Fonny and Tish, between Tish and her family, between Fonny and his father Frank. Yes, awful things happen to people. But at the same time, beautiful things also happen – that’s life. There is an incredible sense of the community and how important it is to them. That’s their strength. In today’s world, it’s easy to think community doesn’t exist. It does, it’s still here, and books like this help give you hope.

2. Words that paint worlds

The author James Baldwin is a great writer, but he writes very sparingly. He says so much, but very succinctly. The relationship between the book’s central characters starts before they realise they are in love. He shows how they come to that realisation while also showing everything around them. The story is built from their perspective, their families’ perspective and what’s happening in the wider world, in 1970s Harlem and beyond.

3. People, not characters

In Baldwin’s writing, people don’t always behave exactly how you would expect them to. Fonny is a Black man in prison, falsely accused of rape. He is also a sculptor and an artist – I love that he doesn’t call himself an artist but an artisan. Arnold Hayward, the lawyer defending Fonny, could have just been a detached, posh, white lawyer, but he’s actually something quite different. Baldwin reminds us that his characters cannot be reduced to types, and we, as readers, can never be entirely certain how events will unfold.

4. Family ties

Tish is just 19 when she gets pregnant – and now she must also support her partner Fonny in his fight for justice within a racist system and society. Everyone knows how important it is to find the money and the means to get Fonny out of prison because everyone knows what will happen to him if they don’t. And it’s mainly her mother Sharon – along with her sister Ernestine, who has drive and determination and is the one who you hope will make it out – who is there for her, along with a whole host of others. I love the relationships between all the family members.

5. A rare honesty

It’s incredibly important to me that the rape of which Fonny is accused is not dismissed by Baldwin. He never makes any suggestion in the book that Victoria Rogers, the young Puerto Rican woman who accused Fonny, has not been raped, or that she is lying. The only question is who raped her.

6. A writer for all time

When Tish is explaining how Fonny became an artist in the first place, she says: ‘That same passion which saved Fonny got him into trouble, and put him in jail. For, you see, he had found his center, his own center, inside him: and it showed.’ In other words, people felt threatened by him, because he had found what he needed and knew where he wanted to go. This prejudice is still happening, and it saddens me deeply. But despite this, Baldwin still writes something so incredible and so strong.