Cementville, A Novel

the long version

In the summer of 1969, a small American town is reeling from mounting casualties of the Vietnam War. As they grieve their returning war dead—seven local National Guardsmen, all killed in one battle—the community faces a baffling new cycle of home-grown rage and resentment. Cementville, quiet and quaint with its population of 1003, reflects a nation caught up in the era's storm of enormous social changes. Told from multiple points of view—an elderly scion of the town founders, a descendant of freed slaves, a lonely and watchful hermit, an adolescent trying to make sense of what's happening to her town—the novel paints a compelling portrait of a community as deeply affected as it is implicated in historical events larger than itself, and so becomes a story resonant with any place and time of change and conflict.