The Wedding
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
INTRODUCED BY DIANA EVANS
'A writer of huge compassion and acute observation, and also of dazzling style . . . Her work is more relevant than ever' DIANA EVANS
'Timelessly cinematic, with painterly visual descriptions and pitch-perfect dialogue that ranges across class, region, race, age, and gender' EMMA GARMAN, PARIS REVIEW
'It's as though we've been invited not so much to a wedding as to a full-scale opera . . . She brings down the house' NEW YORK TIMES
You're on the brink of turning your back on your family, your community, your race, all for some white-bread fantasy you don't half understand.
On a summer weekend in 1953, the residents of the Oval - an exclusive middle-class Black community on Martha's Vineyard - are gathering for the wedding of Shelby Coles. The loveliest daughter of the Oval's most prestigious family, Shelby could have chosen any number of eligible men 'of the right colours and the right professions'. Instead she has fallen in love with a white jazz musician from New York - creating a shockwave that ripples across five generations of family history.
Weaving together past and present, North and South, black and white, The Wedding is an audacious, wise and shattering portrait of American identity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The tranquility of a late summer weekend in 1953 is shattered by a tragic accident in this spare, affecting novel by one of the last surviving members of the Harlem Renaissance. The Oval, the exclusive black enclave on Martha's Vineyard, prepares for the marriage of Shelby Coles, daughter of one of the community's most admired couples. Shelby's choice of white jazz musician Meade Wyler awakens dormant but unresolved racial issues in her family, which includes her physician father, enduring a loveless but socially proper union; her mother, confronting a dwindling pool of partners for her discreet affairs, and her great-grandmother, who dreams of escaping her ambivalence by returning to her aristocratic Southern roots. The arrival of black artisan Lute McNeil upsets the precarious equilibrium of the Oval when his aggressive pursuit of Shelby leads to disaster. Through the ancestral histories of the Coles family, West (The Living Is Easy) subtly reveals the ways in which color can burden and codify behavior. The author makes her points with a delicate hand, maneuvering with confidence and ease through a sometimes incendiary subject. Populated by appealing characters who wrestle with the nuances of race at every stage of their lives, West's first novel in 45 years is a triumph. BOMC and QPB featured selection.
