The Time Of Our Singing

A magnificent, multifaceted novel about a supremely gifted - and divided - family, set against the backdrop of postwar America.

In 1939 at contralto Marion Anderson's great open-air concert in Washington, a German-Jewish emigré physicist and a young black singer are brought together by concern over a lost child. They eventually marry and have three children, bringing them up in a hot-house atmosphere of music and maths, hoping to raise them to have no awareness of race as an issue in their lives. All three are musically talented, but they cannot be protected from the world for long.

Jonah, the eldest, becomes a successful young tenor; Joseph, our narrator and the middle child, becomes a pianist and devotes his talents to the service of his brother's; Ruth, the youngest, turns her back on classical music ("white music") and disappears, on the run with her black husband under suspicion of being a Black Panther.

Richard Powers brilliantly and devastatingly delineates the tragedy of race in America, as it unfolds from Marion Anderson's concert through the Civil Rights movement and the death of Martin Luther King to the death of Rodney King and Louis Farrakhan's 'Million Man March', through the lives and choices of one family, caught on the cusp of identities.

'The Time Of Our Singing' is a hugely ambitious - and brilliantly achieved - novel, as strikingly clever as Richard Powers' previous books, but also deeply thought-provoking and deeply affecting. It is arguably Powers' masterpiece.