ATTICA LOCKE reads from her new novel PLEASANTVILLE

Pleasantville (Harper)

 One of Skylight Books' favorite local authors Attica Locke returns with her most ambitious novel to date, taking on business corruption, scheming local politicians and murder in Pleasantville, which brings back Black Water Rising’s morally conflicted environmental attorney Jay Porter.

It’s now 1996, fifteen years since Black Water Rising, and Porter is struggling to cope with a family tragedy.  He’s decided to quit the law after he wraps up his final case: representing the citizens of Pleasantville, a storied neighborhood on the north side of Houston, against the chemical giant ProFerma.

Houston’s mayoral election is pending, and Pleasantville is a key electoral district due to the long-time organizing efforts of its now elderly “patriarch” Sam Hathorne. Its endorsement can make or break a candidate’s chances. Sam’s son, Axel, Houston’s former police chief and a favorite of Pleasantville faces a run-off against the city’s current District Attorney, Sandra Wolcott. Then Axel’s nephew, Neal, is arrested for the murder of a young woman who disappeared while campaigning in Pleasantville. Sam coerces Jay into serving as Neal’s defense attorney, even though Jay insists he’s not qualified. As he tries to untangle the complicated knot of politics, lies, and family secrets at the heart of the Hathorne campaign, Jay finds that the case puts an entire electoral process on trial, revealing the lengths to which those with power are willing to go to keep it.

Attica Locke’s first novel, Black Water Rising, was nominated for a 2010 Edgar Award, an NAACP Image Award, as well as a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was short-listed for the prestigious Orange Prize in the UK (now the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction).  Her second book, The Cutting Season, published by Dennis Lehane books, is a national bestseller, and, like her debut, was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.  It was also named an Honor Book by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, was long-listed for the Chautauqua Prize, and is the 2013 winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, the largest literary prize for African-Americans.

A graduate of Northwestern University, Locke was a fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmakers Lab and had planned a career as a movie director, but got derailed along the way, spending many years as a screenwriter-for-hire.  She wrote scripts for Paramount, Warner Bros, Disney, Twentieth Century Fox, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, HBO, and Dreamworks.  Highly paid, yet unproduced, Locke grew restless with the Hollywood studio system. “There were days I felt like I was writing solely for the pleasure of a group of studio execs, all with a fifteen-mile radius of Burbank, California, that my work had no meaning beyond that.”  In 2005, she gave herself one year to change this – during which she wrote the first draft of Black Water Rising.  “Besides motherhood, it was the single most transformative experience of my life.”

After two books, she felt pulled toward Hollywood again, explicitly television, where great drama is being produced “like I haven’t seen in my lifetime.”  She is currently co-producer and writer on the upcoming Fox drama, Empire, created by Lee Daniels (The Butler, Precious) and Danny Strong (Game Change, The Hunger Games) and premiering in January 2015.

Locke is a member of the academy for the Folio Prize in the UK and is also on the board of directors for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.  

A native of Houston, Texas, Attica lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter.