The Secret of Magic: A Novel - Softcover

Johnson, Deborah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241968933 ISBN 13: 9780241968932

Verlag: Penguin, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

'[An] addictive tale of intrigue' - the Independent

'A powerful portrait of the Deep South in the year before the civil rights movement' - Sunday Times

If you liked The Help, you'll love this one!' - Entertainment Weekly


In 1946 Regina Robichard is a rarity. A young New York civil rights lawyer, working for Thurgood Marshall, Reggie stumbles across a letter asking her boss to investigate the case of a young black soldier whose body has been found floating in the river in Mississippi. It fires her zeal.

For Reggie, justice is not the only draw to this case. The letter is signed by the reclusive M. P. Calhoun, author of one of the most banned books in the country, a book Reggie loved as a child, about the friendship between three children, black and white, a magical forest - and a murder.

Reggie has just three weeks in the South to investigate. But once down in Mississippi, amid the intoxicating landscape of cotton fields and lush plantations, Reggie not only finds herself further away from New York than she had ever imagined, but walking directly into M. P. Calhoun's book, a place where more than one type of justice exists.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Deborah Johnson is the author of The Air Between Us, which received the Mississippi Library Association Award for Fiction. She lives in Columbus, Mississippi, and is working on her next novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof.
Copyright © 2014 by Deborah Johnson
OCTOBER 1945
G otcha!
Joe Howard Wilson jerked and his hands went straight to his face, and then to his body, for his gun. Groping. Feeling. Saying his prayers. Checking to make sure that he was awake and what had happened in that forest in Italy, all the killing, was over. Checking to make sure it wasn't happening now.
"You all right, mister? Need any help?"
Did he need help?
He opened his eyes then, but he didn't turn them to the voice, didn't answer it, because it was a child's voice. Light, like L.C.'s voice had been in the dream. And Joe Howard didn't want to go back to the dream. Instead, he put a hand on the hard thing right in front of him and realized it was nothing more menacing than a window and that this window was on a courier bus and that this courier bus was passing through Alabama on its way to Mississippi, and that it carried him home.
Outside, it was coming on night. Twilight. "The magic time," his daddy called it, "the make-a-wish moment between the dark and the light."
And the dusk, the gritty Southern grayness of it, its harsh gathering, stopped Joe Howard from seeing out beyond the solitude of his own ref lection, a soldier's ref lection: dark hair, a trimmed mustache, eyes he didn't bother looking into, and farther down from them, the ghostly shadow of a khaki uniform, of lieutenant's bars and a medal. There was no brain, no blood, no bone, no friend called L. C. Hoover sprayed all over this Joe Howard Wilson - at least not anymore.
Other than that, it was already too dark to see much of anything, but Joe Howard didn't mind. This land wasn't foreign to him. It wasn't war. It wasn't Italy. He knew the ways of it, the slow progression of Alabama as it gave way to Mississippi. At its own pace, red clay soil gave place to black, trees grew greener, hills flattened themselves into plain and prairie, into delta.
"Mister?"
At last, Joe Howard turned to the boy. They'd been sitting side by side since the two of them had gotten on the bus together in Birmingham. He had promised the boy's mother to see to it that her child got safely to Revere, Mississippi, all in one piece. The boy's mama, who had worked at the Mobile Dry Docks during the war, was on her way out to Oakland, California, to see what the world might hold for her there. She was sending her son back to her parents in Macon, Mississippi, for what she called "The Duration," until, she told him, she could get herself established.
No way was she ever going back to Mississippi to live. No way was she going to have her son grow up there. Onto the front of his clean overalls, she had pinned a piece of sack paper with his name on it. Manasseh. "Came straight out of the Bible. Revelations," the boy had told Joe Howard. Below that came Manasseh's granddaddy's name, Preacher Charles A. Lacey, and his granddaddy's address, Short Cut Road, Macon, Mississippi. All of this neatly spelled out in looping capital letters. Manasseh still held tight on to

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0241968933
• ISBN 13: 9780241968932
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland