Scottsboro - Softcover

Feldman, Ellen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1447275349 ISBN 13: 9781447275343

Publisher: Picador, 2015

Synopsis

With an introduction by Jayne Anne Phillips

Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, a novel inspired by the shocking true story of the Scottsboro boys.

Even after all these years, the injustice still stuns. Innocent boys sentenced to die, not for a crime they did not commit, but for a crime that never occurred. Lives splintered as casually as wood being hacked for kindling.

Alabama, 1931. A freight train is stopped in Scottsboro, nine black youths are brutally arrested and, within minutes, the cry of rape goes up from two white girls. In the shocking aftermath, one sticks to her story whilst the other keeps changing her mind, and an impassioned young journalist must try to save nine boys from the electric chair, one girl from a lie and herself from the clutches of the past . . .

Stirring racism, sexism and the politics of a divided America into an explosive brew, Scottsboro gives voice to the victims - black and white - of this infamous case. Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2009, Ellen Feldman's classic charts a fight for justice during the burgeoning civil-rights movement.

About this title

Review:

'A fine novel . . . Anyone who wants to appreciate the scale of the miracle that a black man has been elected president of the United States should sit down with Scottsboro (Lionel Shriver)

Taut, haunting . . . a suspenseful page-turner (Daily Telegraph)

A keen sense of drama . . . What emerges is a raw sense of alienation and collision (Publishers' Weekly)

An astute history . . . clear-sighted . . . There were real innocents: African American young men who lost years of their lives, their health and hope. It is for them, and the bitter lessons they taught everyone who touched the case, that Feldman's book has been written and should be read (Independent)

A riveting drama . . . inspired and inspiring . . . Ruby is a gem of a character, and belongs with the best of William Faulkner's, or Alice Walker's, women (San Francisco Chronicle)

Feldman re-animates the drama in a novel that is based on archival records, court records, and first-person accounts but that succeeds overwhelmingly as a work of imagination . . . distilled with great subtlety and wit, into a story worth retelling and remembering (Boston Globe)

From the Publisher:

Long-listed for the Orange Prize

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1447275349
• ISBN 13: 9781447275343
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368