The Last Hotel for Women — Vicki Covington

In her fourth novel Covington threads the turbulent racial unrestof Civil Rights-era Birmingham into the already complicated fabric of onewhite family's life. On Mother's Day, 1961, a busload of freedom riders arrivedin Birmingham, Alabama, from "up North." A group of angry white men, includingmembers of the Ku Klux Klan, armed with pipes and clubs, greeted them.Life in this most segregated of southern cities would never be the same.It is to this pivotal moment that novelist Vicki Covington returns.Birmingham crackles with tension—at the foundry wherePete, Dinah Fraley's husband, works; on the baseball field where whiteand black company teams uneasily take turns; and most of all in Dinah'shotel, where Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor holds court justas he did when Dinah's mother ran the place as a bordello. When Dinah takesin a freedom rider injured in the Mother's Day melee, the conflicts withinand beyond her well-ordered world reach a crisis point.Firmly grounded in Alabama's physical, social, and cultural landscape, The Last Hotelfor Women revisits a painful moment in the South's past and allowsCovington to redeem its collective history with a story of grace and hope.