Breakfast At Libraries

Starr Carter, a black American teenager, leads something of a double life. She lives with her parents, brother Sekani and half-brother Seven in a poor, black neighbourhood, Garden Heights, where gang membership, drug dealing and shootings are rife. But every day, 16-year-old Starr makes a 45-minute journey to a private school in a predominantly white, affluent suburb where she has almost no black friends. The issue is not that she can't fit in there - she has plenty of mostly white friends and a steady relationship with her white boyfriend - but rather that she's acutely aware that she's constantly modifying her behaviour in order to do so. Her wealthy friends don't come to her house in 'the ghetto' for sleepovers. She speaks differently at school. And although she can recite the Black Panthers' Ten-Point Programme off by heart, she's reluctant to be seen as the 'angry black girl'.

One evening, Starr gets a lift home from a Garden Heights party …