The Color of Water - James McBride

This is, quite simply, my favourite book, and I've read a lot! It is a autobiographical account of James McBride, a New York journalist and sometime saxophonist, and his mother. It is written by McBride in two voices, his own, and his mother's, and is the summation of McBride's attempt to delve the roots of his mother's somewhat mysterious past. McBride takes us back to his parent's meeting and subsequent marriage, in the deep south of America, a deeply conservative society, where the marriage, in 1942, of a white jewish daughter of an orthodox rabbi, and a black man, led to an exile to the 'sanctuary' of the New York ...