ARGONAUT BOOKS

It's the early 1950s. Ilka Weissnix, a newly arrived Jewish-Austrian refugee, boards a train from New York hoping to find a 'real American'. In a railroad bar she meets Carter Bayoux, an urbane Black American intellectual. Although twice her age and in the grip of alcoholism, his amused, compassionate worldliness enthrals her. She finds - 'with his first, slightest touch, under her elbow' - that she has fallen in love. Lore Segal described 'Her First American' as 'her favourite child', a reckoning and rendering with her own experiences in the 1950s. Her astonishingly vivid portrait of the char...Read More