Ain't No Grave

From a National Jewish Book Award finalist: A Jewish man and a black woman find love against all odds, in a novel set in the twentieth-century American South.

Nine-year-olds Max Sassaport and Ruby Johnson are best friends who can’t imagine a world where they aren’t together. Unfortunately, no one—not their families, nor anyone else in rural Georgia in 1906—wants to see a White middle-class Jewish boy get too close to the Black daughter of a sharecropper. It’s only a matter time before fate will separate the two. And that day comes on the eve of Ruby’s womanhood, when a violent act sends her running from her childhood home to the blue-collar life of a factory worker in Atlanta.

Max moves to Atlanta a few years later, still longing for the girl he has never forgotten. He is soon taken under the wing of a reporter at the Atlanta Journal. But when Max is assigned to a controversial murder case that pits the Black and Jewish communities against each other, he’s unexpectedly reunited with Ruby. The bond between them is still strong, but with the trial igniting racial tension throughout Atlanta and across the nation, do Max and Ruby dare dream of a future together?

“Mary Glickman is a wonder.” —Pat Conroy, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Boo