The Sky Club - by Terry Roberts

About the Book

Jo Salter, a mathematical prodigy from the mountains of North Carolina, remakes herself from a bank teller to a nightclub owner and bootlegger when the Great Depression upturns her life.

Book Synopsis

Jo Salter, a mathematical prodigy from the mountains of North Carolina, remakes herself from a bank teller to a nightclub owner and bootlegger when the Great Depression upturns her life.

Review Quotes

"Fans of historical and American Southern fiction will breeze through this action-packed, fast-paced novel." -Library Journal

"Roberts has captured a moment in Asheville's history that to this day affects our way of life. It is a well-told tale, reminiscent of John Ehle's great novel, Last One Home. I think Ehle would have been proud of The Sky Club." --Wayne Caldwell, author of Cataloochee

"Ever since Terry Roberts took up writing about his ancestors in Western North Carolina, he has produced a remarkably varied and valuable shelf of novels . . . but The Sky Club is the best one yet! Wildly original, this is a truly Appalachian novel all about money, sex, drinking, and the Great Depression . . . along with the more familiar themes of place and family. I especially admire the apparent ease with which Roberts has created the tough, true, funny, and unforgettable Jo Salter, an independent pistol of a woman who tells this lively tale set in a speakeasy on top of a mountain." --Lee Smith, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Girls

"The Sky Club is a wagonload of perilous fun. Terry Roberts has engaged, with customary vigor, many of his favorite themes: local Appalachian history, mountain cultures rural and urban, personal and communal courage, individuality. The resulting story is sprightly and steady in the manner of its heroine, the gifted Jo Salter. Every page here shines with truthful surprise. Bravo!" --Fred Chappell, author of I Am One of You Forever

"The Sky Club portrays diverse, unexpected facets of the Appalachian region in the years of the Great Depression. It is a novel of climbing--social, financial, emotional, romantic--to a mountaintop, to The Sky Club, to risk and wealth, to danger, and, ultimately, to enduring love." --Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and Chasing the North Star

"With an uncanny ability to make you feel as if you were there--when the Great Depression hit Asheville--Terry Roberts gives voice to Jo Salter, a fiercely independent woman determined to honor her Mama's dying request that she create a life hard to imagine. Not since Memoirs of a Geisha has a male author portrayed a woman's life so convincingly." --Mark Kaufman, Story and Song Bookstore

"In a page-turner set in 1929-1931, Terry Roberts bring us jazz, bootlegging, and financial collapse, as seen through the eyes of a forward-thinking young mountain woman seizing opportunities to flourish.... Rural and urban, old ways and new possibilities meet in the speakeasy and jazz club that gives the novel its name, shaping every aspect of this first-rate narrative of economic and cultural upheaval, risk, loss, and love." --North Carolina Literary Review