My new novel The Sister Knot comes out next month (April 2024), but yesterday I signed a contract with Vine Leaves Press to publish the one after that, Who Cares? (to be released December 2025). Here’s a synopsis: Who Cares? is the story of a lively place where old people go to die. Set in 1960, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, this literary novel — whose title could be a cynical dismissal or heartfelt plea — invites readers into Woodruff Home for the Aged, a public facility for the indigent elderly. Faced with a tanking economy, city officials solicit a developer’s proposal to buy and convert the home to a pricey private senior residence. Woodruff’s tenants fret over where they will live; employees worry about losing their jobs. As the clock ticks, the novel tracks the city’s deliberations about the sale, the strategies devised to block it, and the intimacy and intrigue among the book’s many players. With empathy, humor, and memorable characters, the novel is told from multiple perspectives: Miss Mamie Martine, a feisty octogenarian with an encyclopedic knowledge of movies and her political adversary, Mr. J. T. Hillenbrand, a once wealthy nonagenarian wiped out in the Depression; Jilly Duprey, the teenage biracial great-granddaughter of Mr. Hillenbrand who is at odds with Hugh Pepper, the city manager; Laurel Robbins, the home’s reformist director and Rupert Boyle, the anti-authoritarian custodian who defies her; Mamie’s nephew Simon Walpole, an amateur sleuth intent on digging up dirt on Franklin Savoy, the shady developer; and an omniscient narrator who offers a sardonic prologue and epilogue. Zippy as a spry senior citizen, Who Cares? challenges readers to weigh the disposability of the elderly against their dignity. Read more at NOVELS.
Why writers write: “If you’re a writer, you don’t have to retire but can keep on doing the thing you love till you drop off the chair.” – Alex Miller
