Praying for Sheetrock

Finalist for the 1991 National Book Award and a New York Times Notable book, Praying for Sheetrock is the story of McIntosh County, a small, isolated, and lovely place on the flowery coast of Georgia—and a county where, in the 1970s, the white sheriff still wielded all the power, controlling everything and everybody. Somehow the sweeping changes of the civil rights movement managed to bypass McIntosh entirely. It took one uneducated, unemployed black man, Thurnell Alston, to challenge the sheriff and his courthouse gang—and to change the way of life in this community forever. "An inspiring and absorbing account of the struggle for human dignity and racial equality" (Coretta Scott King)

Rural McIntosh County, Georgia, in the 1970s was bypassed by the civil rights movement, until one unemployed, uneducated black man changed life in McIntosh County forever. As evocative of the South as Faulkner and as compulsively readable as well-crafted fiction, Greene's multi-award-winning memoir will captivate everyone who believes that the fight for equality is worth waging.

An inspiring and absorbing account of the struggle for human dignity and racial equality (Coretta Scott King)

Melissa Fay Greene is an award-winning author and journalist whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, and Newsweek. She is also the author of Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster and the forthcoming There Is No Me Without You (Bloomsbury Press). She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.