R.L.'s dream - Walter Mosley

Ageing bluesman Soupspoon Wise is ill and dying. He has played his music in a thousand bars and juke joints, but never so memorably as the time he played with Robert 'RL' Johnson in the Mississippi delta. That brief encounter with the great genius of country blues haunts Soupspoon as he proceeds to tell his story to the young white woman, Kiki Waters, who has taken him in.

'Mosley's spare prose is reminiscent of a haunting, faded Delta blues tune, while the plot is as gripping as his crime novels . . . Like Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy, Mosley has gone beyond the noir crime genre and has become a frontrunner in modern mainstream American fiction. Buy this book now' NME

'Steeped in the bars and tenements of New York's Lower East Side, this is an exquisite piece of slowly gathering drama . . . Incomparable and unputdownable' Mail on Sunday

'The writing makes you want to cry or shout Amen . . . What is miraculous about Mosley is the way that he lets the story tell itself. He never stands on a soap-box, or proselytises; he just draws his characters so clearly that they become irresistible' New Statesman & Society

'His prose pulsates to the sound of the blues - haunting, funereal and poetic' Arena