Ain't No Grave

From a National Jewish Book Award finalist: A Jewish man and a Black woman find love against all odds, in this novel set during the Leo Frank trial in the twentieth-century American South.

"A fabulous, significant, beautifully rendered addition to historical fiction." —Elizabeth Millane, author of Sixty Blades of Grass

Nine-year-olds Max Sassaport and Ruby Johnson are best friends who can't imagine a world where they aren't together. Unfortunately, no one—not their families, nor anyone else in rural Georgia in 1906—wants to see a White middle-class Jewish boy get too close to the Black daughter of a sharecropper. It's only a matter of time before fate will separate the two. And that day comes on the eve of Ruby's womanhood, when a violent act sends her running from her home to the life of a child laborer at the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta.


Max moves to Atlanta a few years later, still longing for the girl he has never forgotten. He is soon taken under the wing of Harold Ross, star reporter for the Atlanta Journal. But when Max is assigned to a controversial murder case that pits the Black and Jewish communities against each other, he's unexpectedly reunited with Ruby. The bond between them is still strong, but with the trial igniting racial tension throughout Atlanta and across the nation, do Max and Ruby dare dream of a future together?


"Mary Glickman is a wonder." —Pat Conroy, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Prince of Tides and The Boo

"Mary Glickman used the history of the Old South to tell a powerful love story that was not supposed to happen." —John Reynolds, author of The Fight for Freedom

"This beautifully written, historically important story will have you enthralled until the very last page." —Roccie Hill, author of The Blood of My Mother

"Meticulously researched, fast-paced, and thoroughly original, Ain't No Grave is a moving, satisfying read." —Sandra Brett, ADL Southeast board member


"This epic journey for love feels like an instant classic." —Steve Anderson, author of the Kaspar Brothers series