The Wedding

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

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.

Author Biography

Dorothy West was a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1930s. She founded literary magazines Challenge and New Challenge, with Richard Wright as her associate editor. She was a welfare investigator and relief worker in Harlem during the Depression. Her first novel, The Living is Easy, was published in 1948. Her second novel, The Wedding, was published nearly half a century later, in 1995, and was a bestseller. This was followed by The Richer, The Poorer, a rich collection of stories and essays that spanned her long life. She died in 1998, at the age of ninety-one.