Five Days in May

The lives of four people in Graham, Oklahoma, collide in the shadow of a monster tornado. The Rev. McIntosh, Mac, has lost his wife and his faith and is preparing to chuck his career. His 16-year-old daughter, Joy, is pregnant and desperate. Joy's grandfather, Jonas, plans to give his precious wife, Maggie, an overdose of sleeping pills to release her from the ravages of Alzheimer's. But everything changes for all of them when Mac encounters the strange, mystical Princess, a death-row inmate set for execution. Princess "knows things" she can't possibly know, and is determined to carry a secret about the little sister she murdered 14 years ago to her grave. On May 11, 1963, a Category 5 tornado roars across the plains toward Graham.All of the people who'd penciled in death on their calendars for that day confront eternity, but none of them comes to the crossroads of life and death by the path they planned or leaves with the result they expected.Ninie Hammon's first book, the biography God Said Yes, was published by Penguin's Berkeley imprint and established her skill as a storyteller who can weave facts into a compelling human-interest saga. She grew up on the Texas prairie and draws on the stories from a quarter of a century's career as a journalist to fuel her novels. The founder of a newspaper with 65,000 readers, she served as its publisher for a decade and enjoys a large fan base in the Southeast.