Readers follow a diverse community of renters in Southside Birmingham through one transformative year during Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign.

Abraham Kasir has properties scattered across Birmingham, but the ones on Cullom Street hold a special place in his heart. So does his newest tenant, Landon Cooper, a transplant from one of the city’s ritzier suburbs. Landon’s a psychologist managing her own mental illness in the face of divorce and downsizing. Her upstairs neighbor, Abi, is a country girl trying to shake her rural roots even as her father’s illness pulls her back home. Across the street, Jet is a former prostitute reeling from an uncovered truth about her birth mother. Jet has a crush on her neighbor Sam, a weed dealer paying his way through college and wrestling with his dreams for the future. Mr. Kasir acts not just as a landlord but as a father figure to each of them—and most of all to his grandson, Jason. Fresh out of high school, Jason is trying to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps while his own father struggles with drug addiction.

These are the voices in Once in a Blue Moon, Vicki Covington’s new novel set during Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. Change is in the air as readers follow this community through one transformative year. In league with other great Southern novelists including Anne Tyler and Fannie Flagg, Covington writes with tenderness and humor while asking important questions about family, faith, race, class, and—ultimately—hope.

Vicki Covington was born and grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. Her previous work includes the novels Gathering Home, Bird of Paradise, Night Ride Home, and The Last Hotel for Women and the memoir Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage with Dennis Covington. She wrote a column for Oxford American and has also written for The New Yorker. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Alabama State Council for the Arts, she now resides in Lubbock, Texas.

“It’s wonderful to have a new Vicki Covington novel to recommend. Once in a Blue Moon tells the story of a little community of lost souls who find each other in a season when hope and change seemed like real possibilities. This is a lovely book, full of delight and real feeling. I can’t think of another quite like it.”—Mark Childress, author of Crazy in Alabama and Georgia Bottoms