Senna’s debut novel follows sisters Birdie and Cole Lee, daughters of a white mother and Black father growing up in 1970s Boston.

Although the sisters understand themselves as inseparable, the world reads them differently. Cole is visibly Black, while Birdie can pass as white. When their parents separate, the girls are divided along exactly that fault line. Birdie disappears with her mother into a fabricated white identity, while Cole leaves with their father.

Senna shows identity as something produced socially, then learned almost as a performance. Birdie becomes acutely attentive to voice, clothes, class signals, friendship and desire: all the tiny pieces of evidence by which other people decide what someone is. The book moves through race, sisterhood, class, political radicalism and adolescence without turning its characters into tidy representatives of any of them. Published in 1998, it became a significant debut, winning the ALA’s Alex Award and later becoming a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. 

Sceptre / Hodder Headline Australia, Rydalmere, NSW, 1998. First Australian edition. Paperback. Moderate shelf wear to covers, with rubbing, handling marks and creasing, particularly to upper right corner of front cover; light edge and corner wear. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Good to very good condition.