In the Library
Passing
Nella Larsen, 1929
- Form
- Form Novella
- Reading time
- Reading time 2.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 12
- Length
- Length 35k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
About the book
A letter finds Irene Redfield on paper so thin she can see the ink bleed through, signed by a woman she has spent years trying to forget. Clare Kendry crossed over long ago: she lives now as a white woman, married to a man who calls her 'Nig' for fun, certain of what she is, never once suspecting the truth. Nella Larsen builds the novel out of the current running between the two of them, envy wearing the mask of friendship, as Irene keeps letting Clare back into her careful Harlem life even while some colder part of her counts what it costs. What Larsen knows exactly is that safety and longing pull in opposite directions, that a woman can want, helplessly, the very thing built to ruin her. It ends at an open window, high above a Harlem street, with a fall no one can quite explain and a question the book refuses to answer.