Promise

A natural disaster in the Depression Era South sends two very different women in search of their families in this “extraordinary novel” (Jill McCorkle, author of Life After Life).

On Palm Sunday, April 5, 1936, a tornado devastated Tupelo, Mississippi. It killed more than 200 people, not counting an unknown number of black citizens, who were not included in the official casualty figures. In Promise, author Minrose Gwin explores this forgotten tragedy through the eyes of two women—one black, one white; one a great-grandmother, the other a teenager—as they fight for their families’ survival.

Dovey, a local laundress, is flung by the winds into a lake and nearly drowned. Yet she makes her way across Tupelo to find her husband, her sixteen-year-old granddaughter, and her great-grandson, Promise, a light-skinned baby boy. When she stops at the house of the despised McNabb family, she discovers that Jo, the McNabbs’ dutiful teenage daughter, has suffered a terrible head wound. And when Jo later discovers a baby in the wreckage, she is certain it is her baby brother and vows to protect him.

During the harrowing days that follow, Jo and Dovey struggle to navigate a landscape of disaster—as well as the haunting history that links them together. A story of loss, hope, despair, grit, courage, and race, Promise reminds us of the transformative power of facing our most troubled relations with one another.