"The last novel where I rooted for every character, and the last to
make me cry." - Marlon James, Elle
**
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory and the
Oprah's Book Club selection Bewilderment comes Richard Powers's
magnificent, multifaceted novel about a supremely gifted--and
divided--family, set against the backdrop of postwar America**.
On Easter day, 1939, at Marian Anderson's epochal concert on the
Washington Mall, David Strom, a German Jewish émigré scientist, meets
Delia Daley, a young Black Philadelphian studying to be a singer. Their
mutual love of music draws them together, and--against all odds and
their better judgment--they marry. They vow to raise their children
beyond time, beyond identity, steeped only in song. Jonah, Joseph, and
Ruth grow up, however, during the civil rights era, coming of age in the
violent 1960s, and living out adulthood in the racially retrenched late
century. Jonah, the eldest, "whose voice could make heads of state
repent," follows a life in his parents' beloved classical music. Ruth,
the youngest, devotes herself to community activism and repudiates the
white culture her brother represents. Joseph, the middle child and the
narrator of this generation-bridging tale, struggles to find himself and
remain connected to them both.
Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing is a story of self-invention,
allegiance, race, cultural ownership, the compromised power of music,
and the tangled loops of time that rewrite all belonging.
