Böcker av Sarah Bird

Timeless photos offer a rare portrait of the jubilant, vibrant, vital, nearly hidden, and now all-but-vanished world of small-town Black rodeos.

Set during the Great Depression, Sarah Bird's Last Dance on the Starlight Pier is a novel about one woman-and a nation-struggling to be reborn from the ashes.July 3. 1932. Shivering and in shock, Evie Grace Devlin watches the Starlite Palace burn into the sea and wonders how she became a person who would cause a man to kill himself. She'd come to Galveston to escape a dark past in vaudeville and become a good person, a nurse. When that dream is cruelly thwarted, Evie is swept into the alien world of dance marathons. All that she has been denied-a family, a purpose, even love-waits for her there in the place she dreads most: the spotlight.Last Dance on the Starlight Pier is a sweeping novel that brings to spectacular life the enthralling worlds of both dance marathons and the family-run empire of vice that was Galveston in the Thirties. Unforgettable characters tell a story that is still deeply resonant today as America learns what Evie learns, that there truly isn't anything this country can't do when we do it together. That indomitable spirit powers a story that is a testament to the deep well of resilience in us all that allows us to not only survive the hardest of hard times, but to find joy, friends, and even family, in them.

Set during the Great Depression, Sarah Bird's Last Dance on the Starlight Pier is a novel about one woman-and a nation-struggling to be reborn from the ashes.The daughter of a famous vaudevillian dancer, Evie Grace Devlin is pushed onto the stage at a young age and dubbed the toe-dancing "Pint-Sized Pavlova." Evie hates the glare of the spotlight, no matter how much her fame-obsessed mother forces her into it. A scholarship to study nursing at a Catholic hospital in Galveston, Texas provides Evie with her only hope of escape.However, just as Evie is about to be certified, secrets from her past are revealed and she is cast out. It's 1932, and she is just one more casualty of the Great Depression, wandering a nation struggling with massive unemployment, economic failure, and government ineptitude. With no choice but to return to her roots, Evie finds work-as an unregistered nurse-looking after a troupe of marathon dancers. Unexpectedly she is thrust back where she doesn't want to be: in front of screaming, adoring audiences. Though the screams are for her partner, Zave Cassidy, the "Handsome Hoofer Evie's talent soon comes to light. Winning over audiences with their fancy moves and implied romance, they make headlines across the country. Off stage, Evie and Zave grow closer, sharing their dreams, and planning a future together. But Galveston in the thirties is a place of dark glamour and dangerous plots where secrets can ignite and consume dreams, love, and, yes, even lives."These pages brim with primal energy."-National Book Critics' Circle Award-winning author Ben Fountain

In her first nonfiction collection, the beloved, award-winning Sarah Bird showcases four decades of wise yet riotously entertaining essays and articles on womanhood, Texas, motherhood, and her weird, wondrous journey as a writer.

The acclaimed author of Above the East China Sea and The Yokota Officers Club celebrates the uniqueness of Texas women in this beautifully designed gift book