The Final Revival of Opal & Nev
In the early 1970s a fearless, Afro'd singer from Detroit named Opal Jewel teams up with a scruffy British songwriter named Neville Charles to form an Afro-punk duo that is signed to a tiny New York label and almost immediately becomes famous for the wrong reasons. At an industry showcase, a Confederate flag is displayed onstage, a fight breaks out, and a member of Opal's road crew and one-night lover is beaten to death. Four decades later, a young music journalist, the slain drummer's daughter, is assembling an oral history of the duo's short, fiery career when a rumored reunion forces buried questions back into the light. Dawnie Walton's debut tells its story in collected interviews, footnotes, and magazine excerpts, a savvy, pointed novel about race, rock, memory, and who gets to own a story.
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Music journalist S. Sunny Shelton, daughter of the band's late drummer, gathers an oral history of the early-1970s duo Opal Jewel and Nev Charles, a Black Afro-punk star and her white British partner, around a band rumored reunion.
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev was written by Dawnie Walton and published in 2021. It was Walton's debut novel and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
No. The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is fictional, structured as an oral history of an invented 1970s rock duo. Dawnie Walton has cited Daisy Jones & The Six and similar oral-history novels as comparable works.
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is 368 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Final Revival of Opal & Nev takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
