Café au Libris with Will Leitch for The Time Has Come

The author of the Edgar-nominated and ALEX Award-winning How Lucky (“an absorbing thriller with heart”—People), blends suspense, humor, and compassion in a new novel about seven strangers and one very intense evening at a small-town Georgia pharmacy.

Lindbergh’s Pharmacy is an Athens, Georgia, institution—the type of beloved mom-and-pop shop that once dotted every American town but has mostly disappeared. But Lindbergh’s has recently become the object of attention of a local fourth-grade teacher Tina Lamm (“Ms. Lamm to my students”). Tina is certain something very, very bad is happening behind its famous black door and she intends to do something about it.

Her suspicions—and the drastic actions she plans—are the unlikely glue that will connect her to a group of six employees and customers inside the pharmacy one hot Georgia evening. They include Theo, Lindbergh’s scion with a secret of his own; Daphne, a nurse and Army veteran struggling with her faith; Jason, a local contractor uncertain how to deal with his gifted teenage son; Karson, a young lawyer and activist wrestling with a job offer that makes him uncomfortable; David, an Athens music scene lifer whose sobriety has been sorely tested by isolation; and Dorothy, a widow just beginning to regain her bearings.

The fates of these individuals—and their fateful encounter with Tina Lamm—become intertwined in a story that is by turns funny, touching, and tense. As he did in How Lucky, Will Leitch illuminates how we live today through a story of human beings struggling to do their best.