Troublefield

Told in a series of firsthand accounts, from the Governor on down to the sister of one of the linchpins in encouraging the murderers, Troublefield is based on a true story, the double-lynching of two black men that occurred just behind the police station in Blacksburg, SC in 1912. Tracing the tensions that rose in the town between the white millworkers and the rising number of African Americans, Rivers paints a portrait of a town deeply invested in racism and a narrative to justify their fears and hatred; and a woman on the cusp of understanding her complicity in it all. Her novel asks, like Hillary Jordan’s Mudbound, whether it’s possible to see outside of your own perspective when you live in a town and a time governed by racism.
 

Susan Rivers began her writing career as a playwright, receiving the Julie Harris Playwriting Award and the New York Drama League Award, working as an NEA Writer-in-Residence in San Francisco, and being named as a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award for British and American Women Playwrights. Her debut novel, The Second Mrs. Hockaday, was a People Magazine "Best New Books Pick" and a Woman's Day "Editor's Desk Pick" in 2017, as well as an Indie Next pick, Library Reads, Winter OKRA Pick and WNBA Great Group Reads 2018 Selection. The novel was a finalist for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize 2017 and for the Southern Book Prize 2018. Rivers lives with her husband in a former cotton-mill town in upstate South Carolina.