On Amazon last week, just two of the top 20 bestsellers were written by minorities.
And the consequences are clear: One review found that just three out of the 124 authors who appeared on the New York Times bestsellers list in 2012 were people of color. Publishing houses whitewash book covers and blame market demands as author Christopher Myers has pointed out, publishers insist that young white readers won't buy books with black characters on the covers, "despite millions of music albums that are sold in just that way." Stores segregate books with nonwhite characters into "ethnic" sections. Authors of color encounter agents who dismiss or don't understand cultural references in their books. The problem exists in children's literature, too, where just 14 percent of books published in 2014 were by or about people of color, according to the Cooperative Children's Book Center. From MFA programs to publishing houses to critics' circles, the industry is suffering from a lack of diversity. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.Research shows that my anecdotal difficulties result from a systemic problem in the literary and publishing world. It's a love story, a story about justice and defying adversity. It's Australian but it's universal, it touches the heart, it makes you think without telling you how to. It's a very modern, commercial piece of black fiction. What place does a black lawyer have in a white legal system? Does she really want to live in Sydney? She loves the buzz of city life, but is it her? Does everyone have this much trouble keeping up with life? Part family saga, part search for personal fulfilment, Butterfly Song reaches across cultures. But Tarena isn't sure she wants to be a lawyer after all. Her family, who hail from the Torres Strait, are claiming ownership of an exquisite and valuable pearl shell, for sale as part of the deceased estate of a white doctor.
Tarena Palson has just finished her law degree at Sydney University and although she doesn't have her results yet, she's already been thrown into her first case. This novel opens in 1992, the year of the High Court's decision on Indigenous land rights in Australia.
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