Great Expectations

David is a young Black man who works for the Senator from Illinois during his run for the Presidency. He first pays real attention to the Senator at the speech announcing the campaign, and he leaves it ambivalent. The idealistic rhetoric draws him in, yet he wonders how any candidate can hold fervent belief and make the compromises needed to become the first Black president of the United States.

The novel covers eighteen months inside the campaign, told in David's own first-person voice. Along the way he meets a wide range of people, and each raises questions about history, art, race, religion and fatherhood.

Those questions press David to look at his own life again. He is also a father, and he has to settle what his identity means as a young Black man in America.

The book works as a coming-of-age story and as a novel of ideas. It reflects on politics and politicians, on religion and preachers, and on fathers and families. It is the first novel by Vinson Cunningham, a staff writer at The New Yorker. What David decides about the Senator, and about himself, is what the campaign slowly puts to the test.