Rosellen Brown – författare

"All the stories in this remarkable cycle of stories are assigned an address. Each is also a separate life, yet part of the larger life that a neighborhood is; [this book] is an artist's inhabiting of other lives out of love, compassion, anger, and pain. Like the neighborhood, the stories are various. The mother of a damaged child tells us, 'I know how he dreams me. I know because I dream his dreams.' A male bureaucrat laments, 'I am too bored to move. No man can leave his wife for reasons like these....' In these stories, Rosellen Brown is Anglo, Puerto Rican, African American, Caucasian, male, female, parent, child. That is the artist's responsibility, the being of so many. Furthermore, it is a brilliantly written book that, in a period of fiction sniffing and snorting at itself, reminds us how the first rate will not go away."—from the foreword by Frederick Busch

Rosellen Brown''s extraordinary new novel, Half a Heart, tells the story of a former civil rights activist, Miriam Vener, who feels trapped in the comfortable white upper-middle-class life she leads with her family in Houston in the 1980''s. That life suddenly shatters with the appearance, after almost eighteen years, of Veronica (Ronnee), her biracial daughter, born of Miriam''s passionate affair a generation ago with Eljay, a brilliant black professor at a Mississippi college, who has raised the child ever since. When Miriam introduces her daughter to the utterly white New England town where she summers, and to the Houston society which represents the compromise of her sixties ideals, the results are complicated: What claim does Miriam have on Ronnee after all this time, and what does Ronnee want of her mother now?Ronnee wrestles with her fury at her mother''s mysterious disappearance from her life. With which family -- and which race -- does Ronnee identify?Half a Heart is a profoundly moving story about estrangement and intimacy, race and privilege, identity and belonging.