Tropic of Night

by Unknown

  The last thread: my wife was working as an art teacher in an inner city school and she told me about a young black girl in her class, a brilliant artist but subject to fits of uncontrollable rage. It turned out that she had been adopted by a white couple, decent people, but without a clue about what was driving their daughter crazy. About six months after I heard this story, I grabbed an old bound scientific notebook off a shelf, turned to some blank pages and began to write, unusual because I never compose in longhand. I wrote in what seemed almost automatic writing far into the night. In the morning, I saw that I had a story about a white woman in hiding from something that happened in Africa, and from her husband, a famous black poet, and trying to protect a battered black child she’d rescued. It looked like the first chapter of a novel. I was dying to find out what happened next and so over the next two years I wrote Tropic of Night. Magic.

  — Michael Gruber

  About the Author

  MICHAELGRUBERis a Seattle-based writer with a Ph.D. in biology. This is his debut novel, although he has ghosted several New York Times bestsellers.

  Credits

  Jacket design by Marc Cohen

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint:

  The epigraph, which is from Local Knowledge by Clifford Geertz. Copyright Š 1983 by Basic Books, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of Perseus Books, L.L.C.

  Excerpts from “Jeannie C.” and “The Flowers of Bermuda” by Stan Rogers Š Fogarty’s Cove Music. Used by permission of Ariel Rogers.

  Lines from “A Lullaby” by W. H. Auden, reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

  Excerpts from Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought by Henry J. Drewal, John Pemberton III, and Rowland Abiodun, published by the Museum for African Art. Used by permission of Dr. Rowland Abiodun.

  Table of Contents

  Start