What does it mean to take action? To bear witness? What does it cost? These stories take us into the heart of contemporary New York City and its residents' lives.

We meet children, grandmothers and even ghosts as they strive to connect, to stand up for, and to really see each other. Their relationships shape not only their own futures but those of their families and their city. In its portraits of families and friendships, Witness enacts its own testimony. Here is a world where fortunes can be made and stolen in a generation, where strangers sometimes show kindness while those we trust-doctors, employers, siblings-too often turn away, where joy comes in snatches.With prose as upendingly beautiful as it is artfully crafted, Jamel Brinkley offers nothing less than the full scope of life and death and change in the great, unending drama of the city.