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.
‘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.
Newsletter Signup
By clicking ‘Sign Up,’ I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Hachette Book Group’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
Reviews
A writer of huge compassion and acute observation, and also of dazzling style . . . Her work is more relevant than ever
West is a wonderful storyteller, painting vivid and memorable scenes of the life and plight of African Americans from slavery to the fifties. The Wedding is an engrossing tale
West published her second novel, The Wedding (1995), at the age of 87. It received an ecstatic reaction ... 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
In The Wedding, West brilliantly portrays the ferocity of class, race, and gender distinctions within family, groups, and generations
This story of delicately drawn, but crushing conflicts - between black and white, the North and the South, freedom and duty - build to a shattering climax. Once read, it's impossible to forget.
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 ... Through the ancestral histories of the Coles family, West 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 ... a triumph.
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
