Half a Heart is the story of a former civil rights activist, Miriam Vener, who feels trapped in the comfortable white upper-middle-class life she leads with her family in Houston in the 1980’s. That life suddenly shatters with the appearance, after almost eighteen years, of Veronica (Ronnee), her biracial daughter, born of Miriam’s passionate affair a generation ago with Eljay, a brilliant black professor at a Mississippi college, who has raised the child ever since. When Miriam introduces her daughter to the utterly white New England town where she summers, and to the Houston society which represents her own compromise of her sixties ideals, the results are complicated...

Rosellen Brown is the author of the New York Times bestseller Before and After and three other novels, The Autobiography of My Mother, Tender Mercies, and Civil Wars; a collection of stories, Street Games; and three collections of poetry, Some Deaths in the Delta, Cora Fry, and Cora Fry’s Pillow Book. She lives in Chicago.