FICTION: This book is a simple reminder of the cruelty of the inevitable and the beauty of the banal. It's the story of David Strom, German Jewish scientist, and Delia Daley, black American musician - a couple "who thought family would trump race" - and their three children, Jonah, Joseph and Ruth.
It's also the story of black and white America but to think of it, merely, as a book about identity is like thinking of the Grand Canyon as a hole in the ground.
Powers and his narrator, Joseph Strom, are well aware of the risks of beauty. Joseph has seen it in the life of his musically blessed brother, a boy who finds himself in a music boarding school "for doing, beautifully, what his family had most wanted him to do. Cast out forever, just for singing". Despite their parents' idealism, nothing can save the Strom children from reality. "My mother rode in the backseat with me and Ruth. She always rode in the back whenever we travelled together . . . They told me it was to do with Ruthie's safety. Jonah told me it was so that the police wouldn't stop us."
Later, when his parents and sister visit the school, one of his schoolmates tells Jonah: "Your father and your maid and her little kid are here to pick you up". Selfishness and musical genius drive Jonah through and over almost everyone and everything in his life. "Rivers didn't turn in their course to track his sound. Animals didn't fall dead or stones come to life. The sound that came out of him made no difference to the known world. But something in the hall's listeners did stop, flushed out of hiding . . ." And many women love him, women "who'd go to their graves hollowed out by love for my brother".
For Ruth, the search for a black identity propels her away from her family and out of her father's life. She cuts herself off from a man who is "as kind as memory is long", a man who brokenly confides that, as far as his daughter is concerned, "I am the enemy". She chooses to forget that this is the same man who married her mother, a man who had "no people, no place, no home now but her". Yet, on his deathbed, David will call for this daughter. "Where is my darling?" he asks and the warm, decent Joseph cannot tell him.
But this is not a depressing book, rather it's littered with dark humour. When the young Strom boys are brought to sing in a white church they come face to face with "one old man out for his last Sunday on earth". Later, Jonah sings with Gina Hills whose "face was like her voice: best sampled from the middle of the house".
It's a book where hope and language and story and character jostle quietly for attention. A book littered with lines a writer would die for: "Out of the eight jaunty bars, the soprano lifts, an overnight crocus, homesteading the winter beaten lawn". It's a book that made me cry many times, not least when Joseph overhears his father conversing with his long dead wife and, later, finds: "There in the sink were two of everything: two cups, two saucers, two spoons".
Sometimes, when I read, I remember why I love stories that are written out of the need to tell. The Time of Our Singing is such a book, filled with the delicacy and sturdiness and poignancy of love in the world. Gratitude is hardly an adequate recompense for the gifts brought between these covers.
Time of Our Singing
By Richard Powers
Heinemann, 631pp, £14.99
• John MacKenna is a novelist and short-story writer. His current book is The Shackleton: An Irishman in Antarctica, co-written with Jonathan Shackleton, published by Lilliput