The New City: A Novel - Hardcover

In Newton, Maryland, 1973, racial tensions are set to explode in this powerful novel of race, community, and social injustice in America.

powerful social novel about community and race in America--large in its scale and ambition, shattering in its impact--that transforms suburbia into the setting for great fiction.

Newton, Maryland, 1973. The Vietnam War is winding down, the Senate Watergate hearings are heating up. And in this pristine and meticulously planned community, an innocent misunderstanding is about to set the two men who control its quiet streets on a fateful collision course.

Austin Swope is the white lawyer who made the dream of this new city a reality through years of cunning lawyering and smooth real-estate deals. Earl Wooten is the up-by-his-bootstraps black master builder who with his bulldozers and backhoes raised Newton from its foundations--and in the process, he believes, escaped a lifetime of racism and privation. They are best friends, as are their two teenaged sons, Teddy and Joel, each the repository of their respective fathers' deepest hopes. The shining future beckons.

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