The places are always the main characters for her.

More than just a setting, the locations are not a stage but something like the agents of the stories she tells us.

That's why they give the books their titles.

Ann Petry (1908 to 1997) wrote three major novels, panoramas of New England society during the hardship of the Second World War and the years that followed.

All three risk sidewalks that lead us along a variety of intricate narrative paths into obscure and mostly hidden corners of reality that have never been explored in literature before, and all three have their place of action in the title: "The Street" (1946) takes place in Harlem, where the had lived and worked as a journalist since the late 1930s;

It is therefore fitting that the publishing house Nagel & Kimche has for two years been committed to retaining the English-language location information in the titles in the meritorious rediscovery of this important storyteller - she was the first African-American author to reach an audience of millions with her work.

"The Narrows", with which this series now reaches its climax, was published in German in 1955, at that time under the title "Link und Camilo", which unacceptably shortened its story to two characters.

Their fate is tightly woven into a network of many other threads of life, which the novel follows for more than 500 pages and which all get tangled up in the place whose narrowness its name already indicates.

Actually, "The Narrows" refers to a district where generations of migrants struggled to

to give their life a new, broader horizon and to feel at home in the promised land.

But many have already failed there and have looked for other names for it: "The district now had various new names: The Narrows, Nadelöhr, Ganzunten, Little Harlem, Finstereck, Niggertown, because Negroes took the place of earlier immigrants - Irish, Italians and Poles – had taken.”

Deadly Betrayal

As in a mighty kaleidoscope, the narrator shows us constantly changing, albeit mostly gloomy views of this place and lets us take a look into the life of its inhabitants, at the same time share in the longings, the hopes for a new beginning and secret fears that all drive them.

There's Abbie Crunch, a black widow and austere landlady who would never buy watermelons because she thinks otherwise she risks fitting a black stereotype;

there is her tenant Malcolm Powther, who serves as a model butler for wealthy white mansions and always wants to do everything right, even to the point of committing mortal betrayal;

there's Link Williams, Abbie's adopted son, who made it to Dartmouth College and Naval Reconnaissance and is now just working at a seedy bar;