Synopses & Reviews
In the heat of late summer, two New Orleans families — one black and one white — confront a storm that will change the course of their lives.
SJ Williams, a carpenter and widower, lives and works in the Lower Ninth Ward, the community where he was born and raised. His sister, Lucy, is a soulful mess, and SJ has been trying to keep her son, Wesley, out of trouble. Across town, Craig Donaldson, a Midwestern transplant and the editor of the city's alternative paper, faces deepening cracks in his own family. New Orleans' music and culture have been Craig's passion, but his wife, Alice, has never felt comfortable in the city. The arrival of their two children has inflamed their arguments about the wisdom of raising a family there.
When the news comes of a gathering hurricane — named Katrina — the two families make their own very different plans to weather the storm. The Donaldsons join the long evacuation convoy north, across Lake Pontchartrain and out of the city. SJ boards up his windows and brings Lucy to his house, where they wait it out together, while Wesley stays with a friend in another part of town.
But the long night of wind and rain is only the beginning — and when the levees give way and the flood waters come, the fate of each family changes forever. The Williamses are scattered — first to the Convention Center and the sweltering Superdome, and then far beyond city and state lines, where they struggle to reconnect with one another. The Donaldsons, stranded and anxious themselves, find shelter first in Mississippi, then in Chicago, as Craig faces an impossible choice between the city he loves and the family he had hoped to raise there.
Ranging from the lush neighborhoods of New Orleans to Texas, Missouri, Chicago, and beyond, City of Refuge is a modern masterpiece — a panoramic novel of family and community, trial and resilience, told with passion, wisdom, and a deep understanding of American life in our time.
Review
"Piazza tells a towering tale of self, family, and place, a story as old and heartbreaking as humankind itself." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"This emotional novel reads like a memoir, teeming with fear, anger, pathos, hope, determination, and love. It is absolutely essential reading for every American who watched and prayed through those terrible days. Highly recommended." Library Journal
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"Craig's and SJ's approaches to evacuation couldn't differ more, and while their competing narratives occasionally illustrate the city's race and class divide a little too schematically, the point that thousands were left to rot is brought home with kinetic intensity." Publishers Weekly
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"The struggles of the two families depicted are not always well balanced, but Piazza's writing is so fresh and vital readers will feel, all over again, the outrage at the abandonment of this beloved city." Kirkus Reviews
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"Although Piazza's intentions are clearly sincere and good, to slather a novel in sentiment only replaces one set of abstractions with another." Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review
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"To read City of Refuge is to realize that this is what fiction is for: to take us to places the cameras can't go. The novel's characters — and what happens to them — are unforgettable, and so is the portrait of New Orleans, the city Tom Piazza clearly loves with all his large, generous heart." Richard Russo
Review
"City of Refuge is an old-fashioned, realistic novel of New Orleans, with all the sensuousness, all the flash-point tumult, the easy-yet-hard-won virtue of the city, as well all the forthrightness, the deftness and affirming intensity of the form. People ask me when will Katrina begin to inform our art, when will imagination become essential to tell what the raw facts can't. Well, here's an answer: now. City of Refuge speaks eloquently into that silence." Richard Ford
Review
"City of Refuge is a tremendously moving book. While reading it you will have to fight the urge to skip ahead to see what happened, and to whom. This is true even though we all know on a general level 'what happened' during Hurricane Katrina; Piazza takes what we know to a deeper, more human level. There are books that give back to art and there are books that give back to life — this book is among the latter." Mary Gaitskill
Review
"Tom Piazza's City of Refuge is a great read — sweeping and intimate, elegiac and angry, serving as lyrical witness to the destruction and recovery of a great city." Jess Walter
Review
"Whatever Tom Piazza writes is touched with magic. As a former longtime New Orleans resident, I was astounded at how brilliantly Piazza captured (in vivid detail) the nuances of his City of Refuge. Although this is ostensibly a Katrina novel, Piazza transcends genre or pigeonholing in what is one of the most deeply humanistic portraits of people coping with cataclysm since The Grapes of Wrath." Douglas Brinkley
Synopsis
From the award-winning novelist and author of Why New Orleans Matters comes a breathtaking novel of two families, one white and one black, whose lives are torn apart by Hurricane Katrina, and then pieced back together again in ways they couldn't have imagined.
Synopsis
In City of Refuge, a heart-wrenching novel from Tom Piazza, the author of the award-winning Why New Orleans Matters, two New Orleans families—one black and one white—confront Hurricane Katrina, a storm that will change the course of their lives. Reaching across America—from the neighborhoods of New Orleans to Texas, Chicago, and elsewhere—City of Refuge explores this turning point in American culture, one whose reverberations are only beginning to be understood.
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About the Author
Tom Piazza is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including the post-Katrina classic Why New Orleans Matters and the Willie Morris Award-winning novel City Of Refuge. His other books include the critically acclaimed novel My Cold War and the short-story collection Blues And Trouble. A well known writer on American music as well, he won a Grammy Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey. Piazza currently writes for HBO's New Orleans-based dramatic series TREME. He lives in New Orleans.