Giovanni's Room

James Baldwin's spare, aching Paris novel follows an American adrift between a fiancée and a bartender named Giovanni, anatomising shame, desire and the ruin that self-denial leaves behind.

At a glance In a rented room in Paris, an American waits out the last night before a man he once… What it's about Giovanni's Room follows David, a young American in postwar France, whose… Torn between the life he thinks he should want and the one he cannot admit he needs… Baldwin tells it in taut, confessional prose that never looks away.

Giovanni's Room follows David, a young American in postwar France, whose fiancée is travelling in Spain when he falls into a passionate affair with Giovanni, an Italian bartender.