The Sky Club

by Terry Roberts

Overview

Finalist for the 2023 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award

“When I’m dead and buried . . . you get the hell out of here . . . Make a life somewhere else . . . a life that I can’t even imagine.” 

Jo has a gift. She is a mathematical prodigy—a woman who sees and thinks in numbers. She secures a job as a teller at Central Bank & Trust, where she recreates herself as a modern woman and rises through the professional ranks. While working at the bank, Jo becomes fascinated by Levi Arrowood, the dark and mysterious manager of the Sky Club, an infamous speakeasy and jazz club on the mountainside above town. 

When the Great Depression brings Central Bank & Trust down in a seismic crash, Jo is forced to find a new home and job. She finds both at the Sky Club, where she strikes a partnership with the alluring Arrowood as she is drawn deeper into a glamorous and precarious life of bootlegging, jazz, and love.

The Sky Club is the story of money, greed, and life after the crash from the eyes of one remarkable woman as she creates her own imagined life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684428526
Publisher:	Turner Publishing Company
Publication date:	07/19/2022
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	318,913
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Terry Roberts’ direct ancestors have lived in the mountains of Western North Carolina since the time of the Revolutionary War. Many of them farmed in the Big Pine section of Madison County, a place that to this day is much as it’s portrayed in The Sky Club.

Roberts’ debut novel, A Short Time to Stay Here, won the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, and his second novel, That Bright Land, won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award as well as the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South. Both novels won the annual Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, given to the author of the best novel written by a North Carolinian. His third novel, The Holy Ghost Speakeasy and Revival, was published by Turner in 2018. His newest book, My Mistress’ Eyes Are Raven Black, a literary thriller set on Ellis Island, was published by Turner in 2021.

Born and raised near Weaverville, North Carolina, Roberts is the Director of the National Paideia Center and lives in Asheville, North Carolina with his wife, Lynn. 

 

Editorial Reviews

05/02/2022

Roberts (My Mistress’ Eyes Are Raven Black) centers his lackluster latest on a woman whose facility with numbers enables her to make a meaningful career for herself. In 1929, 26-year-old Jo Salter’s mother, Mary, dies from measles. Jo, following her mother’s wishes, leaves their insular community of Big Pine Valley, N.C., for Asheville, where she lands a position as a teller at her uncle’s bank. Salter’s diligence and comfort with math makes her a valued asset, able to easily notice discrepancies in banking records and to reconcile them wherever possible. Those attributes catch the notice of her superiors just as the Wall Street crash of 1929 begins to impact her employer and community. As Salter becomes more confident in her work, she hooks up with a flatly drawn handsome bad boy, Levi Arrowood, owner of a speakeasy. That relationship has its predictable vicissitudes before Roberts concludes with an equally predictable resolution. Meanwhile, the author’s odd choice to present some, but not all, of the dialogue in transcript lends the narrative a choppy feel. Readers are likely to be left wanting. Agent: Margaret Sutherland Brown, Folio Literary. (July)

Publishers Weekly

04/01/2022

It is the winter of 1929, and Josephine Salter's mother is dying. A final wish for her only daughter is that she leave rural North Carolina and make a life that her mother can only imagine. Soon after, Josephine moves to Asheville and reinvents herself as the modern woman Jo, independent and in pants. With a gift for numbers, Jo finds work at the local bank, an inconvenient place to be with the Great Depression looming. Thankfully her life is more than accounts; she's attracted to Levi Arrowood, the enigmatic manager of the Sky Club, a speakeasy Jo frequents to enjoy jazz music and apple brandy. Roberts (My Mistress' Eyes Are Raven Black) is adept at Southern fiction. But there is a frustration to the unlikely good fortune of his protagonist. Tragedy unfolds around Jo in every direction, yet in the end things always work out for her and often improve her life even as she moves further into Levi's underground world of bootlegging. It does keep the plot light-hearted and easy, despite the difficulties of the early 1930s. VERDICT Fans of historical and American Southern fiction will breeze through this action-packed, fast-paced novel.—Shannon Marie Robinson

Library Journal

Fans of historical and American Southern fiction will breeze through this action-packed, fast-paced novel.” —Library Journal

“Roberts has captured a moment in Asheville’s history that to this day affects our way of life. It is a well-told tale, reminiscent of John Ehle’s great novel, Last One Home. I think Ehle would have been proud of The Sky Club.” —Wayne Caldwell, author of Cataloochee

“Ever since Terry Roberts took up writing about his ancestors in Western North Carolina, he has produced a remarkably varied and valuable shelf of novels . . . but  The Sky Club is the best one yet! Wildly original, this is a truly Appalachian novel all about money, sex, drinking, and the Great Depression . . . along with the more familiar themes of place and family. I especially admire the apparent ease with which Roberts has created the tough, true, funny, and unforgettable Jo Salter, an independent pistol of a woman who tells this lively tale set in a speakeasy on top of a mountain.” —Lee Smith, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Girls

“The Sky Club is a wagonload of perilous fun. Terry Roberts has engaged, with customary vigor, many of his favorite themes: local Appalachian history, mountain cultures rural and urban, personal and communal courage, individuality. The resulting story is sprightly and steady in the manner of its heroine, the gifted Jo Salter. Every page here shines with truthful surprise. Bravo!” —Fred Chappell, author of I Am One of You Forever

“The Sky Club portrays diverse, unexpected facets of the Appalachian region in the years of the Great Depression. It is a novel of climbing—social, financial, emotional, romantic—to a mountaintop, to The Sky Club, to risk and wealth, to danger, and, ultimately, to enduring love.” —Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and Chasing the North Star

“With an uncanny ability to make you feel as if you were there—when the Great Depression hit Asheville—Terry Roberts gives voice to Jo Salter, a fiercely independent woman determined to honor her Mama’s dying request that she create a life hard to imagine. Not since Memoirs of a Geisha has a male author portrayed a woman’s life so convincingly.” —Mark Kaufman, Story and Song Bookstore

“In a page-turner set in 1929–1931, Terry Roberts bring us jazz, bootlegging, and financial collapse, as seen through the eyes of a forward-thinking young mountain woman seizing opportunities to flourish… Rural and urban, old ways and new possibilities meet in the speakeasy and jazz club that gives the novel its name, shaping every aspect of this first-rate narrative of economic and cultural upheaval, risk, loss, and love.” —North Carolina Literary Review

From the Publisher