Changó's beads and two-tone shoes

 by William Kennedy. *Starred Review* Kennedy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning bard of Albany, is  back with a jazzy, seductive, historically anchored novel of politics and romance, race and revolution. Young Daniel Quinn awakens one night in 1936 to watch his amiable father, George, preside over a jam session involving Jimmy, a prominent black club owner; Cody, an exceptional black piano player; the future mayor of Albany; and Bing Crosby. Turn the page, and it's 1957. Quinn, now an impulsive and romantic newspaperman, is in Havana, drinking with Hemingway and falling hard for Renata, a rich and daring gunrunner of hyperventilating beauty and perpetual intensity and mystical need. The reporter and the femme-fatale revolutionary meet Castro and marry in a Santeria ceremony invoking Chango, the god of thunder. When next we see them, it's 1968 and racial tension in profoundly corrupt Albany is on the boil. Quinn and Renata tend to personal crises as Jimmy and Cody's civil-rights-activist sons and a rebel priest get caught up in the violence, and George, now senile but still charming, becomes the waltzing ghost of Albany past, positively Shakespearean in his munificent delusions. Music, rapid-fire dialogue, lyrical outrage, epic malfeasance, trampled idealism, and a bit of autobiography drive Kennedy's incandescent and enrapturing tale of the heroic and bloody quest for justice and equality and the gamble of love.. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This gripping addition to Kennedy's celebrated Albany Cycle, which includes Ironweed (1983) and Roscoe (2002), is literary news of the highest order. --Booklist (Check Catalog)