This image is the cover for the book Roadwalkers

Roadwalkers

From the author of The Keepers of the House, a “beautiful” novel following a black mother and daughter through the Great Depression and Civil Rights era (The Boston Globe).

Mary is an orphaned, homeless, African American child, abandoned by the rest of her family and left to care for her younger brother. She becomes a “roadwalker,” a nomad who wanders across the rural south and quickly learns to rely on herself to survive.

When she grows up to become a successful artist and a designer, she has a daughter of her own, Nanda, and she’s determined to hold her child close. But when Nanda is accepted into an elite school on the East Coast, integrating the all-white Catholic girls’ academy, Mary finds she can’t keep some of the world’s cruel realities at bay forever.

Told from the perspective of both mother and daughter, Roadwalkers is the story of a special bond forged by savage history, and a tale of extraordinary loyalty and sacrifice. From a National Book Award finalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, it is “a bold novel [that] seduces us with its vigorous prose, enthralls us with its narrative—and disquiets us with its defiance of our expectations” (The New York Times Book Review).

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Shirley Ann Grau, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

Shirley Ann Grau

Shirley Ann Grau (b. 1929) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist of nine novels and short story collections, whose work is set primarily in her native South. Grau was raised in Alabama and Louisiana, and many of her novels document the broad social changes of the Deep South during the twentieth century, particularly as they affected African Americans. Grau’s first novel, The Hard Blue Sky (1958), about the descendants of European pioneers living on an island off the coast of Louisiana, established her as a master of vivid description, both for characters and locale,a style she maintained throughout her career. Her public profile rose during the civil rights movement, when her dynastic novel Keepers of the House (1964), which dealt with race relations in Alabama, earned her a Pulitzer Prize.