Leaving Tuscaloosa

Imagine Alabama, the sultry summer of 1962--the year before Bull Connor turned his fire hoses on civil rights protesters in Birmingham and the Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church. Two young men, one black, one white, stumble into their destinies as the world erupts beneath their feet. Richeboux Branscomb s journey begins with a stupid mistake one night in a rattle-trap Ford on a dusty road. Acee Waites begins with a missing brother and a ruthless sheriff s search party. Propelled along separate tracks through thirty-six hours of racial turmoil, these estranged boyhood friends encounter tenderness and cruelty, erotic passion and murderous rage. Then amid the spreading fires of racial violence, their paths converge in a terrible, riveting climax. This stunning debut novel from Southern-based writer Walter Bennett, LEAVING TUSCALOOSA, weaves in elegant prose the life-threads of two men segregated by race but alike in their familiarity with aspiration blunted by loss. LEAVING TUSCALOOSA has already earned praise from authors Lee Smith, Elizabeth Spencer, and Craig Nova (The Good Son, Cruisers...) who called the novel unstoppable. Compelling, important, and haunting. The work was a 2010 Finalist for the Bellwether Prize, a nation-wide competition founded and administered by Barbara Kingsolver for unpublished narratives that foreground issues of social change. I hope you agree that this is a novel not to miss this season and will assign the book for review or feature coverage.