The City of Churches

the long version

In an unnamed Southern city in the hot summer of 1963, four girls died in a church bombing, a white merchant who impulsively took down the Jim Crow signs in his store was harassed by segregationists, and a black handyman and a white cop were killed when a stick of dynamite inexplicably exploded between them. Thirty years later, the sons of the two murdered men-one now a minister, the other a writer-return to the city of their birth seeking clues to the fathers who were literally blown from their young lives. Their journeys, and that of their fathers before them, are told in chapters that alternate between 1963 and 1993. The novel telling these interwoven stories is a compelling examination of race and human relations, the terrible cost of the sins of the past, and the promise of racial healing.