City of Refuge
One Book, One New Orleans is proud to announce that its 2008 community-wide reading selection is City of Refuge by Tom Piazza!
City of Refuge is the fictional story of two New Orleans families, one black and one white, set in the days of Katrina and the months following. Read how their struggles, recovery, and resilience reflect the deep human understanding that we share now as New Orleanians.
For a preview of City of Refuge, click on the link in our sidebar or visit www.harpercollins.com/cityofrefuge.
For a list of Tom Piazza’s appearances in Greater New Orleans this fall, click here.
Listen to Piazza speak about the book in Octavia Books‘ podcast interview: Interview
A description of City of Refuge from HarperCollins:
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, the community where he was born and raised. His sister, Lucy, is a soulful mess, and SJ has been trying to keep her son, Wesley, out of trouble. Across town, Craig Donaldson, a Midwestern transplant and the editor of the city’s alternative paper, faces deepening cracks in his own family. New Orleans’ music and culture have been Craig’s passion, but his wife, Alice, has never felt comfortable in the city. The arrival of their two children has inflamed their arguments about the wisdom of raising a family there.
When the news comes of a gathering hurricane-named Katrina-the two families make their own very different plans to weather the storm. The Donaldsons join the long evacuation convoy north, across Lake Pontchartrain and out of the city. SJ boards up his windows and brings Lucy to his house, where they wait it out together, while Wesley stays with a friend in another part of town.
But the long night of wind and rain is only the beginning-and when the levees give way and the flood waters come, the fate of each family changes forever. The Williamses are scattered-first to the Convention Center and the sweltering Superdome, and then far beyond city and state lines, where they struggle to reconnect with one another. The Donaldsons, stranded and anxious themselves, find shelter first in Mississippi, then in Chicago, as Craig faces an impossible choice between the city he loves and the family he had hoped to raise there.
Ranging from the lush neighborhoods of New Orleans to Texas, Missouri, Chicago, and beyond, City of Refuge is a modern masterpiece-a panoramic novel of family and community, trial and resilience, told with passion, wisdom, and a deep understanding of American life in our time.
Crticial Praise for City of Refuge:
“To read City of Refuge is to realize that this is what fiction is for: to take us to places the cameras can’t go. The novel’s characters…are unforgettable, and so is the portrait of New Orleans, the city Tom Piazza clearly loves with all his large, generous heart.”
- Richard Russo
“City of Refuge is an old-fashioned, realistic novel of New Orleans, with all the sensuousness, all the flash-point tumult, the easy-yet-hard-won virtue of the city, as well all the forthrightness, the deftness and affirming intensity of the form.”
- Richard Ford
“City of Refuge does what all great American novels must do: it gives voice to the voiceless and remembers the stories the politicians want us to forget. The future of American fiction-and perhaps America-depends on novelists who can tell us stories like this.”
- Dean Bakopoulos, author of Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon
“As a former longtime New Orleans resident I was astounded at how brilliantly Piazza captured (in vivid detail) the nuances…Piazza transcends genre or pigeonholing in what is one of the most deeply humanistic portraits of people coping with cataclysm since The Grapes of Wrath.”
- Douglas Brinkley
“City of Refuge is a stunning, irresistibly absorbing novel. A dramatic tale about the ravaging impact of Hurricane Katrina, it is also an ode to the ineradicable beauties of a beloved American city and the resilience of its residents.”
- Joanna Scott
“[A] powerfully empathetic second novel about Katrina’s impact in 2005….Piazza’s writing is so fresh and vital readers will feel, all over again, the outrage at the abandonment of this beloved city.”
- Kirkus Reviews
“City of Refuge is a tremendously moving book….Piazza takes what we know to a deeper, more human level. There are books that give back to art and there are books that give back to life-this book is among the latter.”
- Mary Gaitskill
“Tom Piazza’s City of Refuge is a great read-sweeping and intimate, elegiac and angry, serving as lyrical witness to the destruction and recovery of a great city.”
- Jess Walter
