Ain’t No Grave by Mary Glickman

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From a National Jewish Book Award finalist: A Jewish man and a Black woman find love against all odds, in this novel set during the Leo Frank trial in the twentieth-century American South.

“A fabulous, significant, beautifully rendered addition to historical fiction.” —Elizabeth Millane, author of Sixty Blades of Grass

Nine-year-olds Max Sassaport and Ruby Johnson are best friends who can’t imagine a world where they aren’t together. Unfortunately, no one—not their families, nor anyone else in rural Georgia in 1906—wants to see a White middle-class Jewish boy get too close to the Black daughter of a sharecropper. It’s only a matter of time before fate will separate the two. And that day comes on the eve of Ruby’s womanhood, when a violent act sends her running from her home to the life of a child laborer at the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta.

Max moves to Atlanta a few years later, still longing for the girl he has never forgotten. He is soon taken under the wing of Harold Ross, star reporter for the Atlanta Journal. But when Max is assigned to a controversial murder case that pits the Black and Jewish communities against each other, he’s unexpectedly reunited with Ruby. The bond between them is still strong, but with the trial igniting racial tension throughout Atlanta and across the nation, do Max and Ruby dare dream of a future together?

Year first published: 2024