Boundaries

Nunez offers a quiet, sensitive portrait of Anna Sinclair, a 39-year-old Caribbean American working her dream job as head of a publishing imprint specializing in writers of color. Just as Anna travels to the Caribbean to see her mother through chemotherapy and bring her to the United States for surgery, there are major changes at work. She returns to New York to find that the cover art and advertising campaign for an important forthcoming novel are built around a sex scene that hardly represents the story. What's more, a corporate merger has left a smaller role for Anna at the firm; higher-ups think an outsider like her can't really know what fiction appeals to African Americans. She laments the current trend that pigeonholes writers and readers. Even as Anna fights for a literature by writers of color that nevertheless speaks to a universal audience, she's playing the dutiful daughter to the immensely private mother Nunez's readers know from Anna In-Between.