Lavina traverses the near present, in the 1990s and the segregated South of the 1960s. It is the story of Mary Jacob, a children's book author who has virtually no memory of her early life. Billy Ray, Lavina's son and a musical genius, remembers all too well what happened to them on a hot August day in 1963 when their lives changed forever. When the two of them meet again in their hometown, it propels them back to their childhoods. In the second part...

"Eva Cardon has never taken the easy path through life, but she's never faced a challenge like this. In 1947, few women own upscale restaurants in Washington, DC. Fewer still are twenty-four, Black, and wildly successful. But Eva Cardon is unwilling to serve only the wealthiest movers and shakers, and she plans to open a diner that serves Southern comfort to the working class. A war hero and one of Georgia's native sons, Courtland Hardiman Kingsley...