Meet Melvin Ellington, a.k.a. Mouth – a Black twenty-something, ex-college radical who has just been released from a five-year prison stretch having been a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War.

It’s his first day on the outside, back in New York. Hungry for freedom, desperate for female companionship and reunited with concerned parents, Mouth finds himself haunted by his past.

Through a filmic series of flashbacks, we are exposed to Mouth’s time in prison, his college days and, finally, his earliest high school days. Each street corner, subway ride and run-in with an old flame brings with it the echo of his previous life.

Rhythm, blues and jazz is baked into each page, with the sounds of the city – barbershop talk, lively gossip, overheard conversations – imprinted in every word. Wesley Brown boldly explores magnetic but dangerous avatars of Black masculinity in crisis, with a style that’s even more provoking than its subject.

‘Tragic Magic is a tremendous affirmation. One hell of a writer.’ James Baldwin

‘[A] vibrant riff on Blackness, manhood and jazz.’ New Yorker

‘A prescient ancestor to today’s insurgent, boundary-breaching African American fiction . . . deserves rediscovery by a new generation of readers.’ Kirkus