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54 Miles

A Novel

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

The free-standing successor and next novel by the author of the critically acclaimed The Last Thing You Surrender, Leonard Pitts, Jr.'s 54 Miles launches forward twenty years to the fateful weeks of March 1965—from the infamous "Bloody Sunday" march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on the 7th to the triumphant entry into Montgomery on the 25th that climaxed the voting rights campaign—and the families who find themselves confronting the past amid another flashpoint in American history.

Young Adam, who has been raised in Harlem by his white father, George, and Black mother, Thelma, goes back to his parents' home state of Alabama to participate in the voting rights campaign, only to be brutalized in the Bloody Sunday melee. He is still recovering from this when he is struck a heavy emotional blow, learning for the first time—and in the cruelest way imaginable—of a family secret that sends him spiraling and plunging further into danger. To save him, and any hope for their relationship, Thelma is drawn back, for the first time in twenty years, to the South she both hates and fears, and to a reckoning that may result in an incalculable loss.

Meanwhile, Thelma's brother Luther is also spiraling, but in a different way. Forty-two years after his parents were lynched before his eyes, and twenty years after the man who led the lynch mob walked out of court a free man, Luther has just made a shocking discovery. He's found the murderer, Floyd Bitters, helpless and enfeebled in a rest home—unable to move or even to speak. The old man is literally at Luther's mercy. And Luther, who has never overcome this trauma that defined his life, is suddenly forced to relive it all again as he grapples with the awful question of what justice now demands.

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    • Booklist

      May 15, 2024
      Critically acclaimed novelist Pitts returns to the characters featured in his powerful WWII tale, The Last Thing You Surrender (2019). After the war, George and Thelma Simon, a biracial couple, fled Alabama, where their union was illegal, for the hopefully more progressive streets of New York City. Now, 20 years later, the country is once again at a crucial tipping point as the civil rights movement gains traction, and another violent tempest is brewing in Vietnam. The Simons' son Adam leaves college to join Martin Luther King Jr. and other nonviolent marchers in Selma, Alabama, hoping to earn the right to vote for Black citizens. When Adam is injured, Thelma's brother Luther, a WWII hero, is called upon to help. Adam will soon learn about his family history and a long-buried secret. Pitts' mastery of the historical context pulls the reader into this bracing story. The characters are three-dimensionally rendered with motivations and fears authentically driving their actions. Each is scarred, either physically or emotionally, but each discovers that only through forgiveness can one at last be free.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 20, 2024
      Pitts (The Last Thing You Surrender) returns with the page-turning story of a family caught up in the turmoil of the 1960s civil rights movement. Adam Simon, a college student from New York City, arrives in Selma, Ala., to participate in the Selma to Montgomery march unbeknownst to his parents, Thelma, a Black attorney, and George, a white minister. After Adam is badly beaten by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, he winds up in the hospital and out of touch with his parents. His mother enlists her brother, Luther Hayes, with whom she witnessed their parents’ lynching 40 years earlier, to find him. When Luther unexpectedly encounters the man responsible for their parents’ killings, who happens to be residing in the same senior home as George’s father, he falls off the wagon, and his drunken antics bring more trouble to the family. The novel’s strength lies in Pitts’s atmospheric rendering of 1965 Alabama replete with scenes of Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders marching with a “great procession” past the “shy, solemn” gaze of children and the “flinty” young Black men who show up to support them. Historical fiction fans ought to snatch this up.

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from June 1, 2024

      This emotionally charged novel from Pitts (The Last Thing You Surrender) centers around a turning point of the civil rights movement--the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, AL--but its unflinching exploration of a traumatic family history rooted in racism makes the book too immediate and compelling to be called historical fiction. When college senior Adam takes a semester off to travel from New York to Alabama, where his Black mother's marriage to his white father is considered illegal, he believes that his mother's fear for his safety in her hated home state is unfounded, and he's even a little pleased at this sign of worry from his emotionally distant mother. Adam soon confronts not only the frightening and violent attacks on the protest march led by Martin Luther King Jr. but also the racism dividing his own extended family. VERDICT A well-researched, powerfully written novel that takes readers into the heart of the civil rights movement in the South, leaving out none of the anguish, uncertainty, and despair felt by so many involved, but also remembering the courage and hope demonstrated by the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marchers.--Laurie Cavanaugh

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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