Take One Candle Light a Room

A luminous novel from the author of A Million Nightingales (“With every book, the canvas seems to grow, suggesting there’s no limit to where Straight will take readers next.”—Los Angeles Times). 
 
Fantine Antoine is a travel writer, a profession that keeps her happily away from her southern California home most of the time. When she returns to mark the fifth anniversary of the murder of her close friend Glorette, she finds herself pulled into the tumultuous life of Glorette’s twenty-one-year-old son, Victor. After getting involved in a shooting, Victor— Fantine’s godson—has fled to Louisiana. Together with her father, Fantine follows Victor, determined to help him avoid the criminal future that he suddenly seems destined for.
 
But Fantine’s own fate will be altered on this journey as well: her father will reveal the wrenching secrets of his past, and she will be compelled to question the most essential choices she’s made in her life. And all three characters will come face-to-face with the issues of race that beset them: Fantine, whose light black skin has eased her way in the world; her father, who grew up in the Jim Crow South; and Victor, whose fall into violence mirrors the path of so many other black men his age.
 
Take One Candle, Light a Room is a powerfully moving story about the intricacies of human connection, and about the ways in which we find a place for ourselves within our families and the world.