Product Description

Susan Carol McCarthy blends fact, memory, imagination and truth with admirable grace, said of the authors critically acclaimed debut novel, . Now McCarthy returns with another enthralling story of a familytheir longings, their fears, and their secretsswept up in the chaos at the height of the Cold War.

Late October, 1962. Wes Avery, a one-time Air Force tail-gunner, is living his version of the American Dream as loving husband to Sarah, doting father to seventeen-year-old Charlotte, and owner of a successful Texaco station along central Floridas busiest highway. But after President Kennedy announces that the Soviets have nuclear missiles in Cuba, Army convoys clog the highways and the sky fills with fighter planes. Within days, Wess carefully constructed life begins to unravel.

Sarah, nervous and watchful, spends more and more time in the familys bomb shelter, slipping away into childhood memories and the dreams she once held for the future. Charlotte is wary but caught up in the excitement of high schoolher nomination to homecoming court, the upcoming dance, and the thrill of first love. Wes, remembering his wartime experience, tries to keep his familys days as normal as possible, hoping to restore a sense of calm. But as the panic over the Missile Crisis rises, a long-buried secret threatens to push the Averys over the edge.

With heartbreaking clarity and compassion, Susan Carol McCarthy captures the shock and innocence, anxiety and fear, in those thirteen historic days, and brings vividly to life one ordinary family trying to hold center while the world around them falls apart.

Praise for

Gripping . . . Even as those tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis are depicted in unwavering detail and with inexorable dread, the intimate moments between human beings on the verge of the apocalypse stand out. This multilayered story will remain with you long after you turn the last page.Melanie Benjamin, bestselling author of

Susan Carol McCarthy makes a nightmarish moment in Americas recent past terrifyingly immediate and devastatingly personal. This was what it was like to live, and even more astonishingly, to go on lovingas a husband, as a wife, as a young girl on the cusp of womanhoodwith the threat of nuclear annihilation hovering only miles offshore.Ellen Feldman, author of

Susan Carol McCarthys genius is in turning history over to muscle-and-blood human beings who variously hope, fear, lash out, hold steady, and tear at the seams. If you werent there, this is as close to living through the Cuban Missile Crisis as you will ever come.Tom McNeal, author of

Riveting.

Powerful . . . McCarthy vividly evokes a turbulent time in her states recent past. . . . [She] memorably captures the impact of the intense military mobilization on residents. But the novels greatest strength is its seamless portrayal of what this international chess game means for one man on the brink of losing everything.