Joyce Carol Oates' gripping novel - awarded the National Book Award. In 1937, 16-year-old Loretta Botsford stands before the mirror, contemplating her future. She is pretty, full of life, and confident that her life will be happy and successful. But she has no chance: that same night, her brother shoots her lover. Fear and despair drive her into a hasty marriage, and she sinks deeper into the bleak world of the poor and abandoned. "Those people," the white slum dwellers, the individuals from the impoverished neighborhoods of wealthy America who cannot articulate their struggles, are the heroes of this novel. Joyce Carol Oates tells the story of a family that also represents the history of America from the 1930s to the bloody race riots in Detroit in 1968.