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

'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.