Cotton

Christopher Wilson's Cotton is another superb novel about an oddly-named, slightly-off creature who is thrown into the mix with other humans. Leifur Nils Kristjansson Saint Marie du Cotton (Lee) is the son of a black mother and an absent Icelandic father. He emerged from the womb white, blond-haired and blue-eyed — “a black soul in a white wrapper.” Both blacks and whites see Lee as an outsider (“I’m thinking to myself, I don’t fit in either group. Not precisely. I figure as some freak slider, in between.”) and the book traces Lee’s interactions with a variety of characters on the fringes of American society. The novel tries to do too much (the narrative criss-crosses the entire country, and includes Lee's surreal ability to hear the thoughts of the dead), but this is otherwise another very funny, very well-written morality tale.