Walter Mosley’s acclaimed Easy Rawlins mysteries are not only best-selling crime thrillers; they are also serious novels of depth and complexity that open up the physical, social, and moral landscape of postwar Los Angeles to probing examination. So the publication of his first nongenre novel, RL’s Dream, is in every way a literary event. RL’s Dream is a novel about the blues — the blues as an expression of black poetry and black tragedy and how they sit in judgment on the American experience. In contemporary New York, aging bluesman Soupspoon Wise is alone, ill, and dying. He has played his music in a thousand bars, clubs, and juke joints, but never so memorably as the time he played with one Robert “RL” Johnson in the Mississippi delta. That brief, indelible encounter with the great genius of country blues haunts Soupspoon, much as Johnson himself is said to have been possessed by Satan. And so Soupspoon proceeds to tell his story to Kiki Waters, the young white woman who has taken him in, another refugee from a South she can neither deny nor escape. As these two unforgettable characters come to terms with the difficult legacy of the past, Walter Mosley shapes their story into a prose ballad — a blues — of pain and redemption. As in his mysteries, he breathes life into folks who live on the margins of American life, teaching us that we can’t know who we are until we remember where we came from. RL’s Dream sings