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Man Booker Prize-winner Marlon James champions the great lost novel Oreo by Fran Ross, with Samira Ahmed.

Fran Ross was an academic prodigy, a New Yorker of mixed black and white Jewish parentage who went on to write for comedian Richard Pryor in Hollywood but died of cancer very young. Oreo, originally published in 1974, is her only novel. Written at the height of the black power movement, it’s a wild comedy about a young woman trying to find her absent father. The story, written in a multitude of languages and styles, features Greek mythology and a heroine fighting off would be rapists and pimps with martial arts.