Billy
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  • Published: 1 December 1993
  • ISBN: 9780749397715
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $22.99

Billy

Formats & editions
EBook
2 Jul 2021
Audiobook
8 Jul 2021
Paperback
1 Dec 1993
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The tale of Billy Lee Turner, a black boy convicted of murdering a white girl in 1930s Mississippi, is a powerful story of racial injustice and a haunting evocation of life in the American South.

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Discover Albert French's haunting first novel; a story of racial injustice, as unsentimental as it is heartbreaking.

The tale of Billy Lee Turner, a ten-year-old boy convicted of the murder of a white girl in Mississippi in 1937, illuminates the monstrous face of racism in America with harrowing clarity and power. Narrated in the rich accents of the American South, Billy's story is told amid the picking fields and town streets, the heat, dust and poverty of the region in the time of the Depression.

'Billy is a book that will stay with me in my dreams', Tim O'Brien author of The Things They Carried
  • Published: 1 December 1993
  • ISBN: 9780749397715
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $22.99
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About the author

Albert French

Albert French served four years in the Marines as an infantryman and was wounded in Vietnam. After the service, he taught himself photography and worked as a state medical photographer and photojournalist. He is based in Pittsburgh.

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Praise for Billy

Billy is a book that will stay with me in my dreams

Tim O'Brien

Although I only knew Billy Lee Turner for an all-too-brief 214 pages, I will mourn his death for the rest of my life

Claude Brown

I kept trying to think of a writer who has done a better job of capturing clear, powerful and authentic language, the landscape, the people... I kept searching for comparisons and I kept coming up with masters of the art, from Aeschylus to Ernest Gaines

David Bradley

He writes in...in the idiom of his characters, which is rhythmic, expressive, ultimately poetic, and brings William Faulkner to mind

Independent