Precious Williams

Color Blind: A Memoir
By Precious Williams
Bloomsbury, 241 pp., $24

British journalist Precious Williams upends every expectation about race, class, gender and ambition in her startlingly powerful memoir. It opens in 1971, when, at the age of 10 weeks, the author is deposited by her tall, aristocratic Nigerian mother into the arms of “Nanny,” a tiny 57-year-old white woman in Sussex. (Upwardly mobile Africans often privately boarded their children with rural U.K. whites.) Though loved by Nanny and her family, Williams spent an odd, unsettled childhood in a white housing project, always struggling to find her place as a black woman and to understand her absent, glamorous mother in London. Of note: Williams’ subtle, devastating depiction of early sexual abuse. — Deirdre Donahue