Hunger’s Season

Hunger’s Season follows the adventures of an odd couple, an ex-baseball star of the Negro leagues and a young jazz musician, to explore the personal ambitions and conflicts of interest that arise among a vivid set of characters in diverse walks of life in a small Southern community in the early bitter and violent days of the Civil Rights Movement. Rico The Anchorman Jones was the first black man to be awarded the Silver Star for bravery, a war hero and baseball star of the Negro leagues as famous in his day as Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis and Marian Anderson. But when Lot Dundee, a gifted young jazz musician passing through on his own way toward fame and fortune, happens upon Jones, he finds his childhood hero startlingly changed. And the two men are soon swept up by the wave of terror and violence consuming the American South at the time. This is a deeply engrossing story, told with lyricism and humor, in which desperate men and fiercely independent women come alive on the page as they fight for survival and self-respect. It is a novel of passion and insight that deconstructs our popular notions of heroism and illuminates the fears and ambivalence that exist on both sides of the color line in a microcosm of America.