White

A Novel

By: Deni Ellis Béchard

Narrated by: Deni Ellis Béchard

From the celebrated author of the “ferociously intelligent and intensely gripping” (Phil Klay) Into the Sun comes a subversive, daring, and at times satirical novel exploring privilege, humanitarianism, white supremacy, and the absurdity of American exceptionalism.

Assigned to write an exposé on Richmond Hew, one of the most elusive and corrupt figures in the conservation world, a journalist finds himself on a plane to the Congo, a country he thinks he understands. But when he meets Sola, a woman searching for a rootless white orphan girl who believes herself possessed by a skin-stealing demon, he slowly uncovers a tapestry of corruption and racial tensions generations in the making.

This harrowing search leads him into an underground network of sinners and saints—and straight to the heart of his own complicity. An anthropologist who treats orphans like test subjects. A community of charismatic Congolese preachers. Street children who share accounts of abandonment and sexual abuse. A renowned and revered conservationist who vanishes. And then there is the journalist himself, lost in his own misunderstanding of privilege and the myth of whiteness, and plagued by traumatic memories of his father. At first seemingly unrelated, these disparate elements coalesce one by one into a map of Richmond Hew’s movements.

©2018 Deni Ellis Béchard (P)2023 Milkweed Editions

Critic reviews

“A compelling literary fantasia . . . Deni Ellis Béchard’s fifth book blends fiction, literary and cultural criticism, parody and memoir . . . it is as unsettling as it is thought-provoking.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A tale that feel like James Michener and Gabriel Garcia Márquez joined forces to craft a meditation on race. . . . In White, there is nothing clean cut about the way whiteness manifests in geopolitics . . . Captivating, careening, thrilling, and magical, this is intelligent entertainment.”—Foreword Reviews (starred review)

"White's self-aware, self-immolating interrogation of colonialism, whiteness, and fiction makes for a smart and dizzying feat of writing."—Meridian