Hold My Hand

The line between servants and the served is distinctly drawn, in a town founded by the Klan's first Grand Wizard, where hooded customs make strange fruit of strange love. Jeanette Bailey knows this. Lionel Pettibone knows it, too. It's 1946, in the Deep South, and they're in deep trouble. Civil blood stains civil hands. Bigotry bargains their fate. Hate-born curses, old-spirit prophecies, liquor-spiked betrayals, and soul-stripping wrongs total their sorrows in tears and deaths. Secret messages keep their hopes aflame, lighting a path for their deliverance. Uncommon people and unexpected events merge to show them the way. With lives set by birthrights and burdens, their devotion must determine if they will ever be free to love.

In his debut novel, Thurston Neale weaves true events, real history, and the persistence of the Black experience within the mesh of human connections that elicit the compassion in us all. Hold My Hand is a tapestry of plots woven from oral traditions that stitch the virtuous and the vile. Class, race, gender, and sexuality are the threads of its cloth. Characters, colored by every emotion, display its patterns and themes. Glaring and glorious, eviscerating and extravagant, heart-wrenching and hope-rewarding, the epic will hold your soul.