The Time of Our Singing: A Novel
Jan 2004 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
4.0star
1 review
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640
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About this ebook
“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.
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.
Ratings and reviews
4.0
1 review
Khris Sellin
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October 22, 2022
The story of Delia, a Black woman, and David, a German Jew who lost his family in the Holocaust, who fall in love and believe that their love will transcend race, and racism; a saga that has lasting effects on their children and their family.
About the author
Richard Powers is the author of New York Times bestseller Bewilderment; The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; and The 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 Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
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