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 trans 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 comes of a gathering hurricane--named Katrina--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
e 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 had 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.
Editorial Reviews
"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. . . . 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." --Booklist (Starred Review)
"City of Refuge is an old-fashioned, realistic novel of New Orleans, with all the sensuousness, all the flash-point
tumult, the easy-yet-hard-won virtue of the city, as well all the forthrightness, the deftness and affirming intensity
of the form. 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
"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 skip ahead to see
what happened, and to whom. 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
"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
"Tom Piazza's City of Refuge is a great read--sweeping and , elegiac and angry, serving as lyrical witness to
the destruction and recovery of a great city." --Jess Walter
"Like the city he writes about, Tom Piazza's new book is beautiful, harrowing, compassionate, and complex. 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
The Story Behind City of Refuge, by Tom Piazza
City of Refuge pretty much insisted on being written. I didn’t sit down one day and think, "How can I write a novel
about Hurricane Katrina?" In some ways, it was the last thing I wanted to do.
Immediately after Katrina, in September 2005, while my partner Mary and I were evacuated to Missouri from our home in
New Orleans, I began writing my short book Why New Orleans Matters. It was completed in five weeks, and HarperCollins
published it that November. After it was published, I found that I had turned into a kind of spokesman for New Orleans’
recovery; I crisscrossed the country for months, speaking at colleges, doing television and radio interviews, all of
that. I was proud to do it, and I considered it a privilege.
But by the spring of 2006 I was a little burned out on speaking about New Orleans. I needed time to process my own
emotional trauma from the storm. Sometime that March, Sweet Briar College in Virginia invited me to visit and do a
fiction workshop and a public talk on New Orleans. Along with that engagement came a gift: two weeks’ residency at the
Virginia Center for the Creative Arts--time to mend, reflect, and think about what life might look like after this
disaster. Friends had died, friends had lost everything, Mary’s house had been flooded, the house I rented had been
damaged and was unlivable for six months. There was a lot to think about, a lot to reckon with.
Then something strange happened. On my way to Virginia, the characters in City of Refuge began appearing in my mind
with an almost hallucinatory immediacy. I could see them--Lucy, SJ, Craig and Annie and Alice, Wesley--with an eerie
clarity. SJ, a carpenter in the Lower Ninth Ward, working on his house on a hot August afternoon, Craig, a Midwestern
trans to New Orleans, taking his seven year-old daughter Annie to a street parade, SJ’s sister Lucy waking up at an
evacuee camp in Missouri and not knowing where she was….. I could see them all, hear them all, and everything I was
seeing and hearing felt urgent and important.
In nine days at Virginia Center I wrote ten thousand words about these characters, as well as a complete synopsis of
what happened to them, starting about a week before Katrina and ending right around Mardi Gras six months later. I have
never had a writing experience like that, and I won’t count on having another one like it anytime soon. It was like
having a high fever.
That fever lasted for the nearly two years it took me to write City of Refuge. I wrote it at my home in New
Orleans--damaged, resilient, depressed, inspiring, unbearably hot New Orleans--as well as at arts colonies like Yaddo,
the MacDowell Colony, and Virginia Center, and various other places in Virginia, Missouri, and Cape Cod. I did a lot of
driving while I was writing this book. In the course of that time, my landlord decided to sell the house where I had
been living (I ended up buying it myself three months into the writing of the novel, a process I’d just as soon never go
through again), I broke my ankle and spent two months on crutches, several friends in New Orleans committed suicide, and
one of my oldest and dearest friends died just as I finished the first draft.
Through all of this, these characters kept insisting on coming to the page; they forced me to listen to what they had
to say, and to feel what they were feeling. Nothing has ever felt so important to me. Craig and Alice, their friends
Bobby and Jen, SJ and Lucy and Wesley and SJ’s cousin Aaron and his wife Dot, and Dot’s cousin Leeshawn who brings SJ
back to life after all he went through….. these characters became as real to me as anyone I have ever known in life. I
hope they become just as real for anyone who reads City of Refuge.
What happened in New Orleans, and for all the New Orleans people scattered around the country because of the disaster,
is, on one level, particular to New Orleans. But on another level it is an anthology of universal experience--exile,
family separation and reunion, the loss and recling of home, the yearning for community, the need for love. The
disaster affected not just New Orleanians but the entire nation, and will continue to do so for a long time. If my book
helps people understand, empathize, and share some of that experience as if it were their own, then I will feel that I
have done something good with my work.