The Professor's Daughter A Novel

"My father is black and my mother is white and my brother is a vegetable." When Emma Boudreaux's older brother winds up in a coma after a freak accident, she loses her compass: only Bernie was able to navigate--if not always diplomatically--the terrain of their biracial identity. And although her father and brother are bound by a haunting past that Emma slowly uncovers, she sees that she might just escape.In exhilarating prose, The Professor's Daughter traces the borderlands of race and family, contested territory that gives rise to rage, confusion, madness, and invisibility. This astonishingly original voice surges with energy and purpose.

Emily Raboteau is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award and a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches creative writing at the City College of New York.

"A first-rate job, a book that shows great subtlety and skill."--Robert Stone

"Raboteau paints Emma's world with grand, sweeping strokes. . . . Her timing is excellent, her humor is wry, her voice is on point, and her eye works with laser-like precision. Raboteau's sensitivity to life and to people is nothing short of astounding."--Francesca Wodtke, San Francisco Chronicle

"A bolt of energy . . . Fearless and . . . inventive, Raboteau is a writer to watch."--O magazine

"The world that Emily Raboteau has so wonderfully created here is at turns harsh, beautiful, strange, and always real. This work is unflinchingly intelligent."--Percival Everett, author of Erasure