The Flood: A Novel [Paperback]

Nine-year-old Eva Hoffman is the daughter of Austrian Jewish refugees who have found a precarious safety among a small community of European exiles attached to a psychoanalytic hospital in Topeka, Kansas. It is 1951, and the landmark school desegregation case,Brown v. Topeka Board of Education,is being tried in the local court. As the rising river inundates the town, the Hoffmans open their home to refugees from the flood, and Eva learns the complexities of prejudice—and courage—both within and outside her family.

Nine-year-old Eva Hoffman is the daughter of Austrian Jewish refugees who have found a precarious safety among a small community of European exiles attached to a psychoanalytic hospital in Topeka, Kansas. It is 1951, and the landmark school desegregation case,Brown v. Topeka Board of Education,is being tried in the local court. As the rising river inundates the town, the Hoffmans open their home to refugees from the flood, and Eva learns the complexities of prejudice—and courage—both within and outside her family.

Carol Ascher was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1941. Her parents fled Europe during the Holocaust; her father later worked as a psychoanalyst at the Menninger Sanitarium. She is the author of seven books, includingSimone de Beauvoir: A Life of FreedomandThe Flood.Her stories and essays often examine themes of intolerance and inequality, and have appeared inThe New York Times, Ms., The San Francisco Chronicle, Utne Reader, Phi Delta Kappan,and numerous literary journals. She has been published widely to critical acclaim, winning four PEN/National Endowment for the Arts Syndicated Short Fiction Awards, two awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Thomas Cater award for literary nonfiction, and a fellowship from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. She lives in Connecticut.
 

"[A] richly evocative story of the awal3&