Sag Harbor

In the summer of 1985, fifteen-year-old Benji Cooper and his brother Reggie leave their elite, mostly white Manhattan prep school for Sag Harbor, on Long Island, where a small, long-established community of Black professionals owns beach houses in the Sag Harbor Hills, Azurest, and Ninevah subdivisions. Largely unsupervised for the season, Benji works a summer job, navigates new handshakes and profanity, endures a disastrous haircut and the New Coke debacle, and tries to reinvent himself among his friends. Narrated in retrospect, the episodic, often very funny novel is less driven by plot than by memory and place. Whitehead, who summered in Sag Harbor himself, uses Benji's double consciousness — insider and outsider in both the white school world and the Black enclave — to explore race, class, adolescence, and belonging. It was a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist.

Author: Colson Whitehead · Original publisher: Doubleday (New York), 2009