The murder, with its scratched poetic yearnings, sets Wesley and Aurelia on a quest that lasts two decades.

ECONOMIST: New fiction

He is married to Aurelia and has two sons and two daughters.

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Aurelia was born that date and we were married on that day.

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But Mr Carter's hero, Eddie Wesley, Harlem's rising literary star who had himself hoped to marry Aurelia and is the first to find the body, thinks otherwise.

ECONOMIST: New fiction

Thirty months later he is dead: garrotted in the snow in Harlem's Roger Morris Park while nearby, young Aurelia Treene and Kevin Garland, both supposedly scions of black America's aristocracy, celebrate their engagement.

ECONOMIST: New fiction