Visible Empire

An “intimate and revelatory” (Tom Perrota) novel—based on true events—charting a single sweltering summer in Atlanta that left no one unchanged On a humid summer day, the phones begin to ring: disaster has struck. Chateau de Sully, a Boeing 707 chartered to ferry home more than one hundred of Atlanta’s most prominent citizens from a European jaunt, crashed in Paris shortly after takeoff. Overnight, the city of Atlanta changes. Left behind are children, spouses, lovers, and friends faced with renegotiating their lives—the hedonism of the sixties and the urgency of the civil rights movement at the city’s doorstep. With Visible Empire, Hannah Pittard “brings her kaleidoscopic perspective to a catastrophe on an epic scale” (Los Angeles Times). Captivating and ambitious—and inspired by true events—this is a story of race, class, power, privilege, and, ultimately, of promise and hope.