The Brass Clock of Gilead Road

About this book

October 1932 finds Gilead, Mississippi, starving beneath the weight of cotton debt, racial terror, and an approaching reckoning. Eulalia "Lalia" Broussard, the forty-eight-year-old headmistress of the colored schoolhouse, has spent eleven years turning her hard-won knowledge of plants, numbers, and survival into a quiet refuge for the town's Black families. Her secret nighttime apothecary also serves the women of the white planter class, binding her to people whose power she distrusts. When Tobias Rourke, the sheriff's twenty-one-year-old son, comes home from Ole Miss broke and begins asking dangerous questions about justice, Lalia sees both an ally and a liability. As rumors of a lynching gather around the courthouse square, a brass clock in Lalia's schoolhouse becomes the unlikely center of a struggle over evidence, memory, and who gets to tell the truth in a town built to bury it.

Book details

Genres:

Historical Fiction, Southern Gothic, Political Drama

Language:

en

Published:

2026-07-16

Content rating:

R