Ericka Clay (erickaclay.com) has done it again, this time releasing a gritty Christian fiction novel based in 1980's Little Rock that shows God's redemptive love even amid racial and social tension.

A Bird Alone follows the life of Marge Marksmen who lives in a world beyond her control. As the widow of a once struggling traveling vacuum salesman, Marge faces motherhood in a single-wide trailer in the mid-eighties, barely able to keep her teenage daughter in line, not to mention her autistic son. She lives retreated within herself, having once given life a second chance with a new man and a new job, only to have both taken away savagely by the hands of a stranger one summer evening in the seventies. Marge has since convinced herself that God is not to be trusted, relying on her weekly welfare checks and political affiliation to keep her afloat.

Her daughter, Whitney, lives in a separate reality. Her hope is in her boyfriend, Jamal, and the baby she's recently conceived. She's convinced it's her ticket out of the trailer park and into a more normal existence that doesn't involve an out-of-touch mother or a brother she doesn't understand. But when her dream of a happy family peters out, and Whitney discovers a heartbreaking secret Jamal has been keeping from her, Whitney takes fate into her own hands, changing the course of her life forever.

Told through the perspectives of a combative mother and daughter and the people who love them, A Bird Alone shows how God's grace seeps through the cracks of even the most hardened circumstances and how His hand steers life's outcome, not our own.

You can find A Bird Alone and other books at erickaclay.com.