Your Face in Mine

A widely praised young writer delivers a daring, ambitious novel about identity and race in the age of globalization.
 
One afternoon, not long after Kelly Thorndike has moved back to his hometown of Baltimore, an African American man he doesn't recognize calls out to him. To Kelly’s shock, the man identifies himself as Martin, who was one of Kelly’s closest friends in high school—and, before his disappearance nearly twenty years before, white and Jewish. Martin then tells an astonishing story: after years of immersing himself in black culture, he’s had a plastic surgeon perform “racial reassignment surgery”: altering his hair, skin, and physiognomy to allow him to pass as African American. Unknown to his family or childhood friends, Martin has been living a new life ever since.
Now, however, Martin feels he can no longer keep his identity a secret; he wants Kelly to help him ignite a controversy that will help sell racial reassignment surgery to the world. Inventive and thought-provoking, Your Face in Mine is a brilliant novel about cultural and racial alienation and the nature of belonging in a world where identity can be a stigma or a lucrative brand.

Jess Row is a graduate of Yale University, and received an MFA from the University of Michigan. He is the author of the story collections The Train to Lo Wu, which was shortlisted for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize, and Nobody Ever Gets Lost. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Tin House, Boston Review, Granta, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. His stories have been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and have won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O.Henry Award. In 2007 he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. Row is an associate professor of English and Buddhist chaplain at The College of New Jersey, and lives in New York with his wife and two children.