Black & White Audiobook By Dani Shapiro cover art

Black & White

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for $0.00
Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.

Black & White

By: Dani Shapiro
Narrated by: Marguerite Gavin
Try for $0.00

$0.00/mo. after 3 months. Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $15.47

Buy for $15.47

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel
Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult life pulling herself away from her famous mother, the renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose towering reputation rests on the unsettling nude portraits she took of her young daughter from the ages of 3 to 14. The Clara Series, which graced the walls of museums around the world as well as the pages of New York City tabloids that labeled the work pornographic, cast a long and inescapable shadow over its subject.

At 18, when Clara might have entered university and begun to shape an identity beyond her sensationalized, unsought role in the New York art world, she fled to the quiet obscurity of small-town Maine, where she married and had a child, a daughter whom she has tried to shield from the central facts of her early life and her damaging role as her mother's muse.

As Clara charts a path connecting her childhood with her adult life, Shapiro's novel weaves together past and present in images as stark and intense as the photographs that tore the Dunnes apart. A brilliant examination of motherhood, a novel that pits artistic inspiration against maternal obligation and asks whether the two can ever be fully reconciled, Black & White explores the limits and duties of family loyalties, and even of love.

©2007 Dani Shapiro (P)2007 Tantor Media Inc. Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction

Critic reviews

"The novel offers some fine insights into marriage, the making of art and the often difficult mother-daughter dynamic." ( Publishers Weekly)
All stars
Most relevant  
This was okay - I had listened to Inheritance and really like it a lot so I thought I would give fiction a try - it was okay

It was okay

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I remember watching a documentary years ago. always thought it was very interesting story and I tried to keep pace with that story. thank you for writing the book.

Great Story

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This was a beautifully written book about the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters… With a huge plot twist! A great book club discussion book. My only complaint was the reader read Ruth’s voice like an old woman. Ruth was only 57. She gave her an antiquated accent as well.

Loved the story

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.