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 Women revisits a painful moment in the South's past and allows

Covington to redeem its collective history with a story of grace and hope.