Whether you’re preparing for a summer book club or looking for a beach-day read, BridgeDetroit has got you covered with these recently released books written by Detroit authors or with a thematic connection to the city.
Featured writings include historical novel, “A Fortune of Sand” by Ruta Sepetys, political guide, “Black Detroit Democracy Handbook” and historical fiction novel, “Divining Freedom” by Donna Givens Davidson; memoir and self-help book, “The Sketch Collection” by Andre Ebron; and queer romance novel, “Motor City Love Song” by Lisa Peers.
Givens Davidson, Ebron and Peers discussed the inspiration for their books, how the city shaped them, and key reader takeaways with BridgeDetroit, while Sepetys walked through her process in a panel at the Grosse Pointe War Memorial.
- A Fortune of Sand
The Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, and Detroit’s burgeoning industrial and artistic dynasties are put on display in Detroit-native and New York Times Best-Selling author Ruta Sepetys’ historical fiction novel, A Fortune of Sand, available at most major booksellers and Amazon.
The book follows Marjorie Lennox, the daughter of a wealthy automotive dynasty in 1927 Grosse Pointe. Desperate to flee her family’s control and pursue a career in fashion, she enrolls in an arts retreat where artists go missing, and the retreat’s mysterious benefactor has something to hide.
In a June 3 panel at the Grosse Pointe War Memorial, one of many locations she toured during her research process, Sepetys described her personal and professional background, extensive research process and strategy for choosing a topic, often drawing from her initial processes in crafting her first novel, Between Shades of Gray, which follows a young Lithuanian girl’s experience in Siberian gulags after the Soviet occupation in 1941.
“For me, it starts with an event,” Sepetys said. “I look for stories that I feel are underrepresented, because when history remains hidden in the shadows, the people who experience that history feel forgotten and misunderstood.”
Sepetys said that once she identifies a moment in history centered on young people advocating for change, she launches a five- to seven-year research process, including both archival research and interviews with eyewitnesses, family members of victims and historical descendants. The process for “A Fortune of Sand” included a visit to multiple local institutions like the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House and the Eloise Asylum.
Sepetys’ particular inspiration for A Fortune of Sand was not only drawn from Detroit’s history of industrial invention, but also her childhood experiences growing up in Metro Detroit.
“When I was nine years old, my parents received an invitation to go visit a friend of my father’s, who was the fashion writer for The Detroit News, and she lived in the Detroit Golf Club in one of these storied 1920s mansions. This was the first time I learned that homes in Detroit and Grosse Pointe had hidden speakeasies, had underground tunnels and it lit a spark in me.”
After a deep dive into the time period, she had a desire to fill the gaps in the 1920s narrative – going beyond common associations like flappers and jazz — seeking to invite the perspective of women, highlight their autonomy and celebrate Detroit as a hub for creativity.
“Detroit was once known, before the 1920s, as the Paris of the Midwest,” Sepetys said. “Detroit wasn’t just pursuing the future; Detroit was creating the future, and not just with industrial and automotive industries, but with fashion, with musing, with art, with architecture; it was almost overwhelming.”
With a cover coated in automotive steel and Honolulu blue, the official color for the Detroit Lions, A Fortune of Sand travels with Sepetys across the United States on her book tour through August 5, spreading the spirit of Detroit along the way.
“Detroit is known as a city of invention, decline, and reinvention, and that is describing resilience,” Sepetys said. “Resilience is an act of hope. If someone is pushed down and says I will rise, they believe they have hope that change is possible. I wanted to celebrate the incredible fighting spirit of Detroit, faces bloodied but unbowed, never given a break, but never giving up; that is Detroit.”
- Divining Freedom and Black Detroit Democracy Handbook
2026 is proving to be a productive year so far for Donna Givens Davidson. The president and CEO of nonprofit Eastside Community Network published two books – her debut novel, “Divining Freedom” in May and the nonfiction title, “Black Detroit Democracy Handbook” earlier this month.
Black Detroit Democracy Handbook and Divining Freedom can be found on Amazon, while Givens Davidson’s novel is also available at the recently opened Howard Family Bookstore.
Givens Davidson started working on Divining Freedom at the end of 2022 after her mother and sister died earlier that year. The novel is a tribute to her mom, who always wanted Givens Davidson to write a book, she said.
“Over the past four years, I’ve really immersed myself in trying to capture the art of fiction writing,” Givens Davidson said. “There’s so many stories that I tell when I teach and work in the community that highlight the lived experiences of Detroiters.”
Spanning from 1898 to the present, Divining Freedom follows Black Detroiters through five generations, highlighting moments in history from the Jim Crow South, the rise and fall of the city’s Black Bottom neighborhood, to the rise of Detroit’s Civil Rights movement. One of the main characters in the book is Rose Dunbar, a woman who must unlearn the silence inherited from the women before her so she can speak up and find her voice.
As a lecturer at Columbia University, Givens Davidson teaches her students about some of Detroit’s history in her class, “Building Resilience in 21st Century Detroit.” But for her novel, she knew she wanted to tell Detroit’s history in a more digestible way through human experiences rather than facts and policies. Givens Davidson said she wanted to transport readers back to the early 1900s when Black families were relocating to Detroit from the South during the Great Migration and to the summer of 1967 when the city experienced a five-day uprising.
“I want you to experience what it was like to live in a Detroit that is now a Black Detroit, where the automobile industry goes away, where the government starts withdrawing resources and people are struggling on a whole different kind of level,” Givens Davidson said. “And then to watch the economy fall and go into bankruptcy. All of these are things that Detroiters carry, either in their own lived experience – depending on how old you are – or in the family storytelling that you have.”
Meanwhile, Black Detroit Democracy Handbook is a guide designed for community leaders, students, faith leaders, organizers and anyone who is disengaged by politics, Givens Davidson said. The book is broken into four parts: examining how the American democratic process went wrong, the history of Black political power in Detroit, a civic map of the Detroit City Charter and an organizing playbook that offers seven strategies for reconstructing Black power.
“Hopefully it (the book) will help inform organizers, and create an understanding that what we learn about government in high school is not how it functions in Detroit,” Givens Davidson said. “In government class, there’s no such thing as a downtown development authority, there’s no such thing as an emergency manager. We don’t learn about mass foreclosures, predatory lending and the failure of the government to protect us. If we don’t understand those things, then we don’t know how to interface with the government, because we’re not taught that.”
- The Sketch Collection
Recognizing beauty and confronting pain merge in Detroit author Andre Ebron’s third novel, “The Sketch Collection,” available on Amazon and Ebron’s website.
As a combination of a memoir and self-help book, The Sketch Collection walks through Ebron’s personal experiences, both positive and painful, and analyzes them under a framework of affirmations to reclaim personal power, inviting readers to do the same.
“‘The Sketch Collection’ asks for you, the reader, to be vulnerable enough – to be courageous enough – to go back and investigate the lessons that can be carried forward in those positive and those painful experiences,” Ebron said.
Ebron describes a scene from his childhood where he and his family were involved in a semi-truck crash while he was 18 months old, and despite being covered with glass, he escaped without a scratch. He frames this experience under the affirmation “I am protected,” emphasizing growth from safety.
“I walk through ten of my most powerful experiences, and after each chapter, I give a framework for people to digest my experience, while also inviting them to begin investigating their own experiences,” Ebron said. “So this is my ‘lead by example.’ I’m willing to do the hard work and share the hard work that I have done with the public, and this framework will be a companion… for their healing and for their growth.”
With a background in social work, education, and a leadership consultancy firm, Ebron’s experiences advising others through his work guide his message.
“When I was a social worker for the state of Michigan and private agencies, I was able to work with people who have experienced some of life’s most challenging experiences, and help them recognize that their identity, and that their value is not inextricably tied to what they have experienced, I would simply say, ‘you are not what happened to you’,” Ebron said.
Ebron’s inspiration for The Sketch Collection is derived from a painting by Theoplis Smith III, better known as Phresh Laundry. The painting shares its title with Ebron’s first book, “The Drawing Board,” and was created live on stage entirely from tally marks during his first book conference in 2019. Ebron said that putting the painting’s many small pieces together to form a larger picture encouraged him to do the same with his life experiences, featuring the artwork on the cover of “The Sketch Collection.”
“I looked at it as similar to our life,” Ebron said. “One tally mark alone or one experience alone doesn’t make sense of the totality of who we’ve been called to be, but when we put them together, rhythmically and in an artistic fashion, that our life begins to make sense…I do believe that God makes all beautiful in his timing and that our life is literally a collection of sketches that have been masterfully woven together, painted together.”
- Motor City Love Song
Detroit’s garage rock scene in the late 1990s, a time where up-and-coming bands like The White Stripes were performing at Gold Dollar in the Cass Corridor, is the backdrop for Lisa Peers’ latest romance novel, Motor City Love Song.
The Birmingham author explores the relationship between indie rocker Paloma and her manager and girlfriend Jace, who is committed to making the musician a worldwide sensation. But in 2001, Paloma suddenly disappears from the public eye, with Jace left wondering what happened.
Twenty years later, the two are reunited when a beloved Detroit venue Paloma performed in, the fictional Artemis Club, is struggling financially and is set to close. Paloma and Jace must then decide if they want to put the past behind them.
Motor City Love Song, released in February, is the second book from Peers under mainstream publisher Penguin Random House. Her first was “Love at 350,” in 2023, which was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist.
Peers said the inspiration for Motor City Love Song came from regularly going to concerts in the city with her two daughters. Moving to Michigan from San Francisco 20 years ago, the outings were a way to see several national and international bands, Peers said. She also found inspiration in the stories she heard from her partner’s cousin, who was a music booker during the 1990s for the now-closed Cross Street Station bar in Ypsilanti.
“That was a time when The White Stripes were starting in Detroit, and all these other bands that were in and around the Detroit area that needed a place to play,” Peers said. “He was able to give me links to a lot of the songs, links to a lot of YouTube clips that showed me the bands back when they were in their heyday. He also turned me on to a documentary that came out in 2009 called “It Came From Detroit,” and that was an interview with a lot of these acts around the same time that The White Stripes had become international sensations.”
Meanwhile, the Artemis Club is based on a few downtown Detroit venues.
“In my story, it was built in the 1920s as a cultural center for lectures and edification, and by the 90s, all of that stuff had been stripped out,” Peers said. “I was thinking it’s almost like a combination of the Majestic (Theatre), a little bit of the Masonic Temple and a bit of Saint Andrew’s (Hall) as well, where it may have started as something else, but then evolved into a place that got well-known for other reasons.”
Peers’ book can be found at local bookstores such as Next Chapter Books in Detroit, Sidetrack Bookshop in Royal Oak and Love & Other Books in Ferndale.