Running to Fall: A Novel
by Kalisha Buckhanon

Also Available in Hardcover

• Winner 2023 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Silver Award for Fiction: Mystery & Thriller
• The Root, “November 2022 Books by Black Authors We Can’t Wait to Read”
• ESSENCE Magazine’s, “18 New Books We Can’t Wait To Read This Summer”
• Amazon Editors’ Pick, December 2022
• Bustle’s, “The Most Anticipated Books Of September 2022”

From the award-winning author of Speaking of Summer comes a suspenseful, truthful look into the lives of women who drink to survive or just to cope, with a provocative narrator who carries readers along an emotional journey to acceptance.

Tragedy and Victor Powell have moved to the desirable but dark Grayson Glens enclave of dream homes just outside of Chicago. Stressed urbanites, they’ve got to live large in real life to stay large online. With only a few Blacks in their elite gated community, they settle in but never quite feel at home. Then, a missing young Black woman floats up in the Grayson River.

Is the spirit of the mysterious scarlet-lettered woman, Raven McCoy, haunting Grayson during the pandemic?

Tragedy, haunted by her own difficult checkered past versus Victor’s sterling history, thinks so. The pressure to manage his image for profit drives her to drink, even when his trying teen daughter visits. But Victor’s ex-wife, the Grayson gossip and a female detective all close in on Tragedy’s unraveling life. Then Tragedy spirals into addiction, past secrets and the local women’s fight for justice for a woman.

Praise for Running to Fall

“Atmospheric, lyrical, and full of surprises, Running to Fall is a mystery wrapped inside a moving story of love, female relationships, and how darkness lurks under even the most idyllic surfaces. Layered characters and beautiful prose pulled me into the gripping narrative, rooting for troubled Tragedy even as her life unravels. Buckhanon is a powerful writer, and one to watch, and her latest outing is as breathlessly suspenseful as it is deep.”
—Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six

“Running to Fall is the compelling tale of a complicated woman haunted by her past, in a world haunted by a pandemic. It is the story of a woman named Tragedy, and the story behind her name. Her yearning for connection, refuge, and a stable home is masterfully juxtaposed against the isolation imposed on her by the alienating setting, as one of few Black residents of an Illinois exurb. She encounters a cast of equally complex women with their own secrets and regrets as she faces difficult truths and choices.”
—Tiffany Gholar, author of A Bitter Pill to Swallow and The Unforeseeable Future

The Audiobook is read by Shari Peele

Running to Fall is available for sale at Bookshop.org, your favorite independent bookstore, and wherever books are sold.

Running to Fall is distributed by Ingram Content Group and Black Books Wholesale