The Time of Our Singing: A Novel [Paperback]

The last novel where I rooted for every character, and the last to make me cry. - Marlon James,Elle

From the Pulitzer Prizewinning author ofThe Overstoryand the Oprah's Book Club selectionBewildermentcomes Richard Powers's magnificent, multifaceted novel about a supremely giftedand dividedfamily, set against the backdrop of postwar America.

On Easter day, 1939, at Marian Andersons epochal concert on the Washington Mall, David Strom, a German Jewish ?migr? scientist, meets Delia Daley, a young Black Philadelphian studying to be a singer. Their mutual love of music draws them together, andagainst all odds and their better judgmentthey 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'sThe Time of Our Singingis a story of self-invention, allegiance, race, cultural ownership, the compromised power of music, and the tangled loops of time that rewrite all belonging.

Richard Powersis the author ofNew York TimesbestsellerBewilderment;The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; andThe Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; among many other novels. Powers has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction, and is a four-time National Book Critics ls3