Tobacco Sticks

It's 1945 in Richmond, Virginia, a time when people traveled mostly by train and doors were left unlocked. The narrator of this novel is 13 year old Lee Harwell, whose father, Burke, is a respected lawyer.
It's summer, the town is stirring, tension is building. Lee no longer sits listening to the porch swing creak in the humid air. Fanny Jones, a black maid, has been accused of stealing a $5,000 silver tea set from a prominent family. The story climaxes in a courtroom drama fueled by passions and injustices that lay the social groundwork for the civil rights movement decades later. Hazelgrove writes with warmth and feeling, his characters richly drawn; but it’s the love between Lee and his farther that makes this novel so moving and evocative of its time.

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Author, William Elliott Hazelgrove is an award-winning author of fiction... having just been awarded ‘Book for the Year, 2008’ by Books-and-Authors.net, and also Winner of the American Library Association "Editors Choice Award" for his latest novel Rocket Man. He was born in Richmond, Virginia. William is the author of four novels, Ripples, Tobacco Sticks, Mica Highways and Rocket Man. He is the writer in residence for the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and writes in the attic of the Hemingway birthplace. His novels have been chosen as Book of the Month Selections, included in anthologies of the Best Novels of the Nineties, translated into many languages, and optioned for movies. He has taught college, sold real estate, brokered mortgages, worked construction, waitered, cooked, cleaned. He lives west of Chicago with his wife, three children, a dog, a cat, a guienna pig, and one Beta fish.