City of Refuge: A Novel [Paperback]

InCity ofRefuge,a heart-wrenching novel from Tom Piazza, the author of the award-winningWhy New Orleans Matters,twoNew Orleansfamilies—one black and one white—confront Hurricane Katrina, a storm that will change the course of their lives. Reaching acrossAmerica—from the neighborhoods ofNew OrleanstoTexas,Chicago, and elsewhere—City ofRefugeexplores this turning point in American culture, one whose reverberations are only beginning to be understood.

In the heat of late summer, two New Orleans families—one black and one white—confront a storm that will change the course of their lives.

SJ Williams, a carpenter and widower, lives and works in the Lower Ninth Ward community where he was born and raised. Across town, Craig Donaldson, a Midwestern transplant and the editor of the city's alternative paper, faces deepening cracks in his family. When the news of the gathering hurricane spreads—and when the levees give way and the floodwaters come—the fate of each family changes forever.

Explaining this citys inexorable, gravitational pull to outsiders who see only corruption, crime, poverty, and malarial weather is a tough order, but every page of Piazzas deeply felt story explains a larger truth about why people live where they do: because its home, and heart.Though [its] stories are fictional, they maylC%