ABOUT
THE BOOK

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 Philadelphia Negro studying to be a concert singer. Their mutual love of music draws them together, and -against all odds and better judgment – they marry. They vow to raise their children beyond time, beyond identity, steeped in song. But their three children, the unwitting subjects of this experiment, must survive America’s brutal here and now.
Jonah, Joseph, and Ruth grow up during the Civil Rights era, come of age in the riot-torn 1960s, and live out their adulthoods through 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, chooses a path of militant activism and repudiates the white culture her brother represents. Joseph, the middle child and the narrator of this multigenerational tale, struggles to remain loyal to them both siblings. As a polarised America threatens to tear the family apart, only their deep, shared love of song stands any hope of preserving them.