-Piazza is now truly a poet of place.- --New Orleans Times Picayune -Tom Piazza-s writing pulsates with nervous electrical tension - reveals the emotions that we can-t define.- -Bob Dylan Tom Piazza-s Why New Orleans Matters, finished just weeks after the storm, was the book that defined New Orleanians- response to the storm and its devastation of the people and culture of that great city. Now, in City of Refuge, this richly talented and award-winning writer reaches deeper and wider, to offer a searching novel that traces the lasting effects of the disaster on the fabric of our culture-through the stories of two families, one white and one black, as their lives are torn apart by the storm and then slowly stitched back together in its aftermath. As the story opens, SJ, a black man who lives in the Lower Ninth Ward, is heading for a confrontation with his seventeen-year-old nephew Wesley, who has just disappeared after being arrested for beating up his girlfriend. SJ-s older sister Lucy, Wesley-s mother, is a soulful mess beloved by everyone, but she has been unable to corral her son, and SJ fears he is about to be lost for good. Meanwhile, across town, Craig Donaldson, a Midwestern transplant and the editor of the city-s (fictitious) alternative newsweekly Gumbo, is facing deepening cracks in his own family. Craig-s love for New Orleans music and culture brought them to the city, but Alice has never felt at home there, and since the arrival of their two children, Alice-s alarm at the city-s crime, poverty, and bad schools has become a wedge between her and Craig. When the storm breaks, it scatters SJ-s family like windblown debris. As the flood waters rise, he and Lucy are rescued by two separate boats; Lucy is dispatched to the Convention Center and then to Missouri, while SJ endures the Superdome before being taken away to Texas, where he continues his frantic struggle to reunite with Lucy and Wesley, who had disappeared before the storm. The Donaldsons, too, find their family strained to breaking by the storm: Alice persuades Craig to evacuate, and they flee-first to Jackson, Mississippi, and then finally to Alice-s family in Chicago. After the storm, Craig is determined to return, but soon realizes that he may have to choose between the city he loves or the family he hoped to raise there. Reaching across America-from the neighborhoods of New Orleans to Texas, Chicago, and elsewhere-City of Refuge explores this turning point in American culture, one whose reverberations are only beginning to be understood. Like The Grapes of Wrath and Steinbeck-s other great novels of the Depression, it sounds complex and troubling chords of race, class, culture, and regional identity, but always through the double helix of these two families- lives. Piazza-s characters will live in readers- minds and hearts, and their encounter with the storm will force us all to confront raw truths about our nation and ourselves. Rich with emotional insight, raising d