Monday, Monday

In this gripping, emotionally charged novel, a tragedy in Texas changes the course of three lives

On an oppressively hot Monday in August of 1966, a student and former marine named Charles Whitman hauled a footlocker of guns to the top of the University of Texas tower and began firing on pedestrians below. Before it was over, sixteen people were dead and thirty-two wounded. It was the first mass shooting of civilians on a campus in American history.

With pathos and electrifying storytelling, Elizabeth Crook’s Monday, Monday follows three students whose lives are forever altered by the massacre. There’s Shelly, who leaves her math class and walks right into the path of the bullets; and two cousins, Wyatt and Jack, who rush out of the university buildings intending to help. Thus begins a relationship between the three, eventually entangling their lives in a forbidden love affair, an illicit pregnancy, and a vow of secrecy that will span forty years. Reunited in a desert town in West Texas decades after the tragedy, the three are forced to confront the thing that changed them—and to discover what’s most meaningful in their lives.

Monday, Monday is Crook’s first novel in eight years. In its humane, touching treatment of a national tragedy, it marks a generous and thrilling new direction for a gifted American writer.