New York, NY: Harper (2008)

Paperback. As new.

Published for the first time, at the centennial of his birth, a novel by Richard Wright written shortly before his death Richard Wright wrote A Father’s Law in a six-week period near the end of his life. He never finishd the novel and never managed to correct the typescript. But his daughter (and now literary executor), Julia Wright was with him while he wrote in a remote farmhouse in the French countryside. She believes it is an important addition to the Wright corpus.

“It comes from his guts and ends at the hero’s ‘breaking point.’ It explores many themes favored by my father like guilt, the difficult relationship between the generations, the difficulty of being a black policeman and father, the difficulty of being both those things and suspecting that your own son is the murderer. It intertwines astonishingly modern themes for a novel written in 1960 . . .” Prescient and fascinating, A Father’s Law is a gift from one of America’s greatest writers.