The Last Hotel for Women

In her fourth novel Covington threads the turbulent racial unrest of Civil Rights-era Birmingham into the already complicated fabric of one white family's life. On Mother's Day, 1961, a busload of freedom riders arrived in Birmingham, Alabama, from "up North." A group of angry white men, including members of the Ku Klux Klan, armed with pipes and clubs, greeted them. Life in this most segregated of southern cities would never be the same. It is to this pivotal moment that novelist Vicki Covington returns. Birmingham crackles with tension--at the foundry where Pete, Dinah Fraley's husband, works; on the baseball field where white and black company teams uneasily take turns; and most of all in Dinah's hotel, where Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor holds court just as he did when Dinah's mother ran the place as a bordello. When Dinah takes in a freedom rider injured in the Mother's Day melee, the conflicts within and beyond her well-ordered world reach a crisis point. Firmly grounded in Alabama's physical, social, and cultural landscape, The Last Hotel for Womenrevisits a painful moment in the South's past and allows Covington to redeem its collective history with a story of grace and hope.