Your basket is empty.
-
- Books
The Wedding - Virago Modern Classics (Paperback)
Dorothy West (author), Diana Evans (author of introduction)Published: 22/08/2019
Opening outwards from a keenly observed summer wedding drawn from the cream of the East Coast’s Black bourgeoisie, West’s neglected classic grows to encompass five generations of a remarkable American family.
With a new introduction by Diana Evans, author of Ordinary People.
Set on a bucolic Martha's Vineyard in the 1950s, The Wedding tells the story of life in the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's black bourgeoisie. Within this inner circle of 'blue-vein society', we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of their loveliest daughter, Shelby, who could have chosen from 'a whole area of eligible men of the right colors and the right professions.' Instead, she has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Mead Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community.
Not just the story of one wedding, but of many, this compelling story offers insights into issues of race, prejudice and identity while maintaining its firm belief in the compensatory power of love.
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 extraordinary American family. It is an audacious accomplishment, a monumental history of the rise of a black middle class, written by a writer who lived it. Wise, heartfelt, and shattering, it is Dorothy West's crowning achievement.
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
ISBN: 9780349012049
Number of pages: 240
Weight: 190 g
Dimensions: 196 x 126 x 17 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
In The Wedding, West brilliantly portrays the ferocity of class, race, and gender distinctions within family, groups, and generations - Entertainment WeeklyWest 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 - PAris ReviewThe 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. - Publisher's WeeklyYou 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 TimesWest 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 - USA Today
You may also be interested in...
Please sign in to write a review
Sign In / Register
Sign In
Download the Waterstones App
Would you like to proceed to the App store to download the Waterstones App?