Nine-year-old Eva Hoffman is the daughter of Austrian Jewish refugees who have found a precarious safety among a small community of European exiles attached to a psychoanalytic hospital in Topeka, Kansas. It is 1951, and the landmark school desegregation case, Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, is being tried in the local court. As the rising river inundates the town, the Hoffmans open their home to refugees from the flood, and Eva learns the complexities of prejudice—and courage—both within and outside her family.

Carol Ascher was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1941. Her parents fled Europe during the Holocaust; her father later worked as a psychoanalyst at the Menninger Sanitarium. She is the author of seven books, including Simone de Beauvoir: A Life of Freedom and The Flood. Her stories and essays often examine themes of intolerance and inequality, and have appeared in The New York Times, Ms., The San Francisco Chronicle, Utne Reader, Phi Delta Kappan, and numerous literary journals. She has been published widely to critical acclaim, winning four PEN/National Endowment for the Arts Syndicated Short Fiction Awards, two awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Thomas Cater award for literary nonfiction, and a fellowship from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. She lives in Connecticut.
 

"[A] richly evocative story of the awakening to adulthood, this novel demands slow and appreciative reading. Ascher should be applauded for writing what critic and novelist John Gardener once called 'moral fiction'."

—Los Angeles Times

"A refreshing and extremely moving novel."

—Ms. Magazine
 

"I wish there were more books like Carol Ascher's—sensitively observed, full of affection and life, and . . . passionately concerned with crucial moral questions."

—Rosellen Brown