A Moment in the Sun

John Sayles’s monumental new novel is set at the turn of the twentieth century, as America is struggling to define itself in a rapidly changing world. It is a time that sees the contentious dawn of U.S. imperialism in Cuba and the Philippines, the last desperate stand of Reconstruction in the American South, and the development of mass media—especially motion pictures—as the lens through which the public will increasingly interpret world events.

Sayles plunges the reader into this chaotic world, following the interweaving lives of Royal Scott, a black man from Wilmington, North Carolina, who has joined the 25th (Colored) Infantry to “be a credit to his race” and attract the love of a woman far above his station; Hod Brackenridge, a white laborer and vagabond who drifts into the Colorado Volunteers to escape the harsh economic realities of the times; Harry Manigault, a white Southerner drawn to New York and the exciting new frontier of the movies; and Diosdado Concepción, a Filipino “ilustrado” and linguist struggling to bring liberty to his own deeply divided nation.

Traveling from the Yukon gold fields, to New York’s bustling Newspaper Row, to Wilmington’s deadly racial coup of 1898, to the bitter triumphs at El Caney and San Juan Hill in Cuba, and to war zones in the Philippines, Some Time in the Sun is a book as big as its subject: history rediscovered through the lives of the people who made it happen.