Set in Kansas City, Missouri, during the Jazz Age of the 1920s and 1930s, Such Sweet Thunder is a majestic evocation of childhood and parental love told through the eyes of a boy, Amerigo Jones. This unique and vivid portrait of an era marred by racial segregation and relentless, daily injustices is nonetheless rendered with love and longing for a time and place that was enriched by a vibrant, burgeoning and widely influential African American culture and a fierce feeling for family and community.

Amerigo is just discovering, but not really understanding, racial prejudice. Like any growing boy, he is also learning about sexuality, art, literature, and life itself. He is a dreamer, and yet it is clear that many of his dreams will not come true, not because of who he is, but because of the colour of his skin.

Completed in the 1960s, Vincent Carter was unable to find a publisher for his ambitious book, in part because it did not fit what publishers were looking for in the way of 'Negro literature'. But when Richard Wright's widow, Ellen, read it, she could hardly contain her enthusiasm, and finally siad simply that such a tableau of childhood by a black man had never been done. By 1970 Carter had given up trying to find a publisher. He died in 1983, and his work came perilously close to disappearing without trace.

Such Sweet Thunder is a jazz song of a book, a river of sound, clearly influenced by the big band jazz style that was pioneered in the Kansas City of Carter's youth, and the novel is composed to transport the reader on an evocative and emotional journey. Today it remains both an innovative work of literature and an unrivalled first-hand account of African American life in pre-World War II America. For such a book to surface at so late a date is a rare event. Herbert R. Lottman predicts in his foreword that Such Sweet Thunder " is a text destined for that small shelf of memorable literature certain to be printed and reprinted over the years."

VONCENT O. CARTER was born in Kansas City in 1924. At seventeen he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He landed on a Normandy beachhead and took part in the drive towards Paris. Back in the United States, he earned a college degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and spent a graduate year at Wayne State in Detroit. Eventually he returned to Europe, spending time in Paris, Munich and Amsterdam before settling in Bern, where he spent the rest of his life in a sort of self-imposed exile. He died in 1983.

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