The Wedding - Couverture souple

INTRODUCED BY DIANA EVANS

'You have only to read the first page to know that you are in the hands of a writer, pure and simple. At the end, it's as though we've been invited not so much to a wedding as to a full-scale opera, only to find that one great artist is belting out all the parts. She brings down the house' NEW YORK TIMES

On a summer weekend in 1953, the Coles family gathers in preparation for the wedding of its loveliest daughter, Shelby. The Oval is a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's black bourgeoisie and Shelby could have chosen from 'a whole area of eligible men of the right colours and the right professions'. Instead she has fallen in love with a white New York jazz musician and the 'blue-vein society' she belongs to struggles with the changing face of its community.

Through a delicate interweaving of past and present, North and South, black and white, The Wedding unfolds outward from a single isolated time and place until it embraces five generations of an American family. It is an audacious accomplishment, a monumental history of the rise of a black middle class. Wise, heartfelt and shattering, this landmark novel is Dorothy West's crowning achievement.

'Set on the Vineyard on a single summer weekend, The Wedding is narrated by an irresistibly droll omniscient voice that veers across centuries to trace the knotty, reverberating heritage of an affluent African American family . . . timelessly cinematic, with painterly visual descriptions and pitch-perfect dialogue that ranges across class, region, race, age, and gender' EMMA GARMAN, PARIS REVIEW