Chevy in the Hole

A gorgeous, harrowing debut from Kelsey Ronan that follows multiple generations of two families in Flint, Michigan, through the city’s notorious growth and decline, with a remarkable contemporary love story at its center.

When we meet August “Gus” Molloy on the opening pages of Chevy in the Hole, he’s just overdosed at the Detroit restaurant where he works. Shortly after, he packs it in and returns home to his family for another shot at sobriety. There, he meets and falls quickly in love with Monae Livingston, an urban farmer trying to coax a tenuous rebirth from the damaged land. As Gus and Monae begin dreaming up an oasis together in Flint, the city’s water supply is being quietly poisoned.

Woven throughout their story are the stories of Gus’s and Monae’s families—Gus’s white and Monae’s Black—members of which have had their own triumphs and devastating setbacks trying to survive and thrive in their troubled city. In 1937, Gus’s great-grandmother runs supplies to the strikers at Chevrolet while her husband, a luckless salesman, daydreams of riches. Meanwhile, Monae’s grandmother, Esther Williams, arrives during the Great Migration to confront the limitations of “GM Crow.” One of Esther’s sons finds his political voice in the civil rights movement while another works at the ill-fated theme park AutoWorld. We watch the families brush elbows long before Gus and Monae ever meet, on one now-infamous night, when Keith Moon of The Who drives a Cadillac into the swimming pool of the Holiday Inn.

A novel about the things that change over time and the things that don’t, Chevy in the Hole is ultimately a love letter to Flint and the resilience of its people. Throughout, the city reverberates through these families and friendships, which remind us again and again what people need from one another and from the city they call home.