The Wedding

This incredible novel by the last surviving writer of the Harlem Renaissance deserves to be discovered by a new generation of readers. Introduced by Diana Evans, author of Ordinary People, and now reissued in our beautiful Classics With Bite series.

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

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.

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

In The Wedding , West brilliantly portrays the ferocity of class, race, and gender distinctions within family, groups, and generations

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

A writer of huge compassion and acute observation, and also of dazzling style . . . Her work is more relevant than ever

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.

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.