Last Hotel for Women

"Covington is a writer of great skill who doesn't waste a word. Her ear for speech is nearly perfect; her scenes come vividly to the mind's eye, and through it all she never loses the thread of any of the themes that occupy her story--race, religion, lust, lost innocence, family, redemption, baseball. " --San Francisco Chronicle

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 segregated southern city would never be the same. It is to this pivotal moment that novelist Vicki Covington returns in The Last Hotel for Women.

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 fault-lines in and beyond her well-ordered world crack open.

Evoking Alabama's physical, social, and cultural landscape, The Last Hotel for Women revisits an iconic moment in the South's past and allows Covington to redeem its collective history with a story of grace and hope.