“People ask me when will Katrina begin to inform our art, when will imagination become essential to tell what the raw facts can't. Well, here's an answer: now. CITY OF REFUGE speaks eloquently into that silence.”
– Richard Ford
 In the heat of late summer, two New Orleans families—one black and one white—confront a storm that will change the course of their lives.
SJ Williams, a carpenter and widower, lives and works in the Lower Ninth Ward, the community where he was born and raised. His sister, Lucy, is a soulful mess, and SJ has been trying to keep her son, Wesley, out of trouble. Across town, Craig Donaldson, a Midwestern transplant and the editor of the city’s alternative paper, faces deepening cracks in his own family. New Orleans’ music and culture have been Craig’s passion, but his wife, Alice, has never felt comfortable in the city. The arrival of their two children has inflamed their arguments about the wisdom of raising a family there. When the news of a gathering hurricane – named Katrina – comes, the two families make their own very different plans to weather the storm. The Donaldsons join the long evacuation convoy north, across Lake Pontchartrain and out of the city. SJ boards up his windows and brings Lucy to his house, where they wait it out together, while Wesley stays with a friend in another part of town.
But the long night of wind and rain is only the beginning—and when the levees give way and the flood waters come, the fate of each family changes forever. The Williamses are scattered – first to the Convention Center and the sweltering Superdome—and then far beyond city and state lines, where they struggle to reconnect with one another. The Donaldsons, stranded and anxious themselves, find shelter first in Mississippi, then in Chicago, as Craig faces an impossible choice between the city he loves and the family he hoped to raise there.
Ranging from the lush neighborhoods of New Orleans to Texas, Missouri, Chicago, and beyond, CITY OF REFUGE is a modern masterpiece—a panoramic novel of family and community, trial and resilience, told with passion, wisdom, and a deep understanding of American life in our time.
“To read City of Refuge is to realize that this is what fiction is for: to take us to places the cameras can't go. The novel's characters--and what happens to them--are unforgettable, and so is the portrait of New Orleans, the city Tom Piazza clearly loves with all his large, generous heart.”
– Richard Russo
“City of Refuge is a tremendously moving book. While reading it you will have to fight the urge to go to the end to see what happened. This is true even though we all know on a general level 'what happened' during Hurricane Katrina; Piazza takes what we know to a deeper, more human level. There are books that give back to art and there are books that give back to life--this book is among the latter.”– Mary Gaitskill
"Whatever Tom Piazza writes is touched with magic. As a former longtime New Orleans resident, I was astounded at how brilliantly Piazza captured (in vivid detail) the nuances of his City of Refuge. Although this is ostensibly a Katrina novel, Piazza transcends genre or pigeonholing in what is one of the most deeply humanistic portraits of people coping with cataclysm since The Grapes of Wrath."
– Douglas Brinkley
From BOOKLIST (starred review):
“Piazza knows New Orleans, its flavors and aromas, music and magic, pragmatism and joie de vivre. He also understands the full tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and is determined to dispel complacency to make sure it isn’t forgotten. So we meet SJ Williams, an African American carpenter and Vietnam vet who loves his home in the Lower Ninth Ward, keeps his demons at bay through the discipline of hard work, and looks out for his sister and teenage nephew. Craig Donaldson is an Anglo-American magazine editor crazy about his adopted city, a passion no longer shared with his wife now that they have young children. In the pre-storm chapters, the conflicts and dreams of Piazza’s characters, men and women of bedrock goodness, define home, revealing all that Katrina will disrupt and destroy. Then, in unforgettable scenes of biblical consequence, Piazza dramatizes more devastatingly than any journalistic account the hurricane’s shocking aftermath, aligning the failure to protect, rescue, and respect the people of the Lower Ninth with the sweeping brutality of war. By following his characters into the Katrina Diaspora and back again, Piazza tells a towering tale of self, family, and place, a story as old and heartbreaking as humankind itself.”
— Donna Seaman
“City of Refuge is a stunning, irresistibly absorbing novel. A dramatic tale about the ravaging impact of Hurricane Katrina, it is also an ode to the ineradicable beauties of a beloved American city and the resilience of its residents.”
– Joanna Scott
"City of Refuge does what all great American novels must do: it gives voice to the voiceless and remembers the stories the politicians want us to forget. The future of American fiction—and perhaps America—depends on novelists who can tell us stories like this."
– Dean Bakopoulos
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Tour Dates for CITY OF REFUGE
NEW ORLEANS, LA:
Tuesday, August 19, 2008, 6:00 PM
OCTAVIA BOOKS - MAP
513 Octavia Street, New Orleans, LA
JACKSON, MS:
Wednesday, August 20, 2008, 5:00 PM
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BLYTHEVILLE, AR:
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