A Place We Knew Well
“Wes [Avery], who served in World War II and saw firsthand the destruction at Hiroshima, is sure nothing can survive the game of chicken Kennedy and Khrushchev are playing… Riveting.” ~ Kirkus Reviews
“Gripping . . . Even as those tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis are depicted in unwavering detail and with inexorable dread, the intimate moments between human beings on the verge of the apocalypse stand out. This multilayered story will remain with you long after you turn the last page.”~ Melanie Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Aviator’s Wife
“Susan Carol McCarthy makes a nightmarish moment in America’s recent past terrifyingly immediate and devastatingly personal. This was what it was like to live, and even more astonishingly, to go on loving—as a husband, as a wife, as a young girl on the cusp of womanhood—with the threat of nuclear annihilation hovering only miles offshore.”~ Ellen Feldman, author of Next to Love
“Susan Carol McCarthy’s genius is in turning history over to muscle-and-blood human beings who variously hope, fear, lash out, hold steady, and tear at the seams. If you weren’t there, this is as close to living through the Cuban Missile Crisis as you will ever come.”~ Tom McNeal, author of To Be Sung Underwater
"McCarthy deftly takes us back to a time of looming fear and crazy contradictions. from dog-tags for school kids to weddings in fallout shelters, as a family battles its own shadowy demons as well as the specter of a mushroom cloud." ~ Joy Wallace Dickinson, author of Remembering Orlando