Serious Music

A thrilling, darkly comic journey of a Black musician making his way from the trenches of the Somme to the jazz clubs of Harlem and the illicit inner sanctum of Woodrow Wilson’s White House, from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of James.

In 1918, Arthur Champion is one of a handful of Black students attending the Oberlin Conservatory of Music when he runs afoul of a vindictive professor and is unceremoniously enlisted in the United States Army. What follows is one man’s sweeping journey through a decade of profound transformation, offering a kaleidoscopic view of America during a period of seismic social change from the author hailed by The Chicago Tribune as “our current Great American Novelist.”

A brilliant examination of racism and ownership in art, Serious Music is a breakneck, high-octane novel filled with electrifying humor and the rigorous moral clarity that has become the hallmark of this masterful writer’s contribution to American literature.