Time's Undoing

Any book in which a journalist and a librarian are the heroes gets a gold star from me. In this gripping novel, a Black journalist from Detroit who writes about the Black Lives Matter movement goes to Birmingham, Alabama, in 2019 on a personal and professional quest.

Her great-grandfather was, she believes, killed there by a white policeman 90 years ago, and she’s determined to find out the truth. She also thinks his story can illuminate what’s happening nationwide today. Based on this compelling premise, the novel is a mystery, a love story, a history, and an examination of racial… show more.

I never lived in the South, but both my parents migrated from Alabama to Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. I'm an historian whose first professional work was as a journalist, so Time's Undoing hit me in all the tenderest places.

This moving work of historical fiction captured my heart and imagination with a series of deft snapshots that pinged between present-day Birmingham, Alabama and a dark chapter in the city's early twentieth-century past. Cheryl Head mines her own family history to deliver a searing account of unsolved murder and racial injustice. The contemporary thread of this… show more.