The Moonstoners

As a child, Noel Trudeau and her family are forced to flee from their Louisiana home in the aftermath of a heinous murder, sparked by a secret that will shadow the Trudeaus for the rest of their lives. Ten years later, on the same day that President Kennedy is assassinated, Noel discovers that she's pregnant by date rape at seventeen, forcing her to marry her abusive boyfriend. As the surrounding nation is divided over race, equality and the escalating Vietnam war, Noel and her toddler find refuge from her husband in the Black neighborhood of the steel town of Langston, Indiana, under the watchful eye of an elderly childless couple. But her sequestered existence is threatened when Ricky Ziemny, a sensitive artist from a staid Polish American family, falls in love with her. Desperate to keep her past secrets hidden from him, she's confronted by — and irresistibly drawn to — his protective older brother, Leon, who's engaged to be married. As the country is torn apart at the seams, so are these two families. And when Noel's long-kept secrets are about to unravel, she questions what it really means to love. Set in the crucible of the 1960s when the quest for love as the supreme panacea is stilled by assassins' bullets, The Moonstoners is a journey into the heartbreaking choices we make when we love too much.