54 miles A novel

Pitts (The Last Thing You Surrender) returns with the page-turning story of a family caught up in the turmoil of the 1960s civil rights movement. Adam Simon, a college student from New York City, arrives in Selma, Ala., to participate in the Selma to Montgomery march unbeknownst to his parents, Thelma, a Black attorney, and George, a white minister. After Adam is badly beaten by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, he winds up in the hospital and out of touch with his parents. His mother enlists her brother, Luther Hayes, with whom she witnessed their parents' lynching 40 years earlier, to find him. When Luther unexpectedly encounters the man responsible for their parents' killings, who happens to be residing in the same senior home as George's father, he falls off the wagon, and his drunken antics bring more trouble to the family. The novel's strength lies in Pitts's atmospheric rendering of 1965 Alabama replete with scenes of Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders marching with a "great procession" past the "shy, solemn" gaze of children and the "flinty" young Black men who show up to support them. Historical fiction fans ought to snatch this up. (July)

This emotionally charged novel from Pitts (The Last Thing You Surrender) centers around a turning point of the civil rights movement--the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, AL--but its unflinching exploration of a traumatic family history rooted in racism makes the book too immediate and compelling to be called historical fiction. When college senior Adam takes a semester off to travel from New York to Alabama, where his Black mother's marriage to his white father is considered illegal, he believes that his mother's fear for his safety in her hated home state is unfounded, and he's even a little pleased at this sign of worry from his emotionally distant mother. Adam soon confronts not only the frightening and violent attacks on the protest march led by Martin Luther King Jr. but also the racism dividing his own extended family. VERDICT A well-researched, powerfully written novel that takes readers into the heart of the civil rights movement in the South, leaving out none of the anguish, uncertainty, and despair felt by so many involved, but also remembering the courage and hope demonstrated by the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marchers.--Laurie Cavanaugh