A novel as significant as it is engrossing. --Booklist, starred
review
Grant Park is a page-turning and provocative look at black and white
relations in contemporary America, blending the absurd and the poignant
in a powerfully well-crafted narrative that showcases Pitts's gift for
telling emotionally wrenching stories.
Grant Park begins in 1968, with Martin Luther King's final days in
Memphis. The story then moves to the eve of the 2008 election, and cuts
between the two eras. Disillusioned columnist Malcolm Toussaint, fueled
by yet another report of unarmed black men killed by police, hacks into
his newspaper's server to post an incendiary column that had been
rejected by his editors. Toussaint then disappears, and his longtime
editor, Bob Carson, is summarily fired within hours of the column's
publication.
While a furious Carson tries to find Toussaint--while simultaneously
dealing with the reappearance of a lost love from his days as a 60s
activist--Toussaint is abducted by two white supremacists plotting to
explode a bomb at Barack Obama's planned rally in Chicago's Grant Park.
Toussaint and Carson are forced to remember the choices they made as
young men, when both their lives were changed profoundly by their work
in the civil rights movement.
