New York, NY: North Point Press (1999)

Vicki and Dennis Covington, like many of their generation, “promised each other nothing” when they wed, and got more than they’d bargained for: drinking, infidelity, infertility, uncertainty. Gradually tumult gave way to sobriety, parenthood, and meaningful work, but a yearning remained. The triumph of this haunting book, which succumbs to neither sentimentality nor cynicism, is its portrayal of the unpredictable eddying of passion through the institution that enshrines but cannot contain it.

New York, NY: Simon and Schuster (1996)

On Mother’s Day, 1961, a busload of freedom riders arrived in Birmingham from “up North”. A group of Klansmen, 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, in her fourth and richest novel to date. 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.