Wherever There Is Light (2015)

Peter Golden's novel, published by Atria in 2015, follows Julian Rose, who leaves his family in Germany at fifteen for 1920s America and prospers first as one of the East Coast's leading bootleggers and then in real estate, and Kendall Wakefield, a free-spirited college senior whose mother, the daughter of a slave, founded an African-American college. A dinner there in 1938 reunites Julian with his parents and begins his love affair with Kendall. (Open Library)

Watches

Hamilton (unidentified model): Talking with Kendall at her mother's college, Julian notices that Kendall's watch is a man's rectangular Hamilton on a black leather band. It is her grandfather's: she still wears it on its cracked band with her dressy clothes at church, uses it as a timer in her darkroom to develop a roll of film for eight minutes, and near the end of the novel Julian takes it from his pocket to return it, as she had asked him to. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Glancing at her watch, which Julian noticed was a man's rectangular Hamilton on a black leather band, Kendall stood and took her New Yorker. (Peter Golden, Wherever There Is Light, scan cataloged as Thorndike Press large print, 2016, pp. 72 to 73, a sentence across the page break, closing up the OCR's line-break hyphen in "noticed"; the cracked band is on p. 105, the darkroom timer on p. 238 and the return on p. 339; Internet Archive scan OCR)