The Wedding
Published on 22. January 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
240 pages
978-0-349-02084-6 (ISBN)
Description
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.
'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.
Reviews / Votes
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 * Paris Review * 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. * Publisher's Weekly * 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 * USA Today * In The Wedding, West brilliantly portrays the ferocity of class, race, and gender distinctions within family, groups, and generations * Entertainment Weekly * 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 * New York Times * 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. * The Times *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Little, Brown Book Group
Dimensions
Height: 161 mm
Width: 210 mm
Thickness: 12 mm
Weight
196 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-349-02084-6 (9780349020846)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
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Other editions
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Persons
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.