Seven Days in June

Tia Williams's Seven Days in June, published in 2021, is set in New York. Eva Mercy is a Brooklyn single mother who writes erotica and is feeling pressed from every direction. Shane Hall is a reclusive, award-winning literary novelist who avoids attention and who, to everyone's surprise, turns up in the city. When the two of them meet unexpectedly at a literary event, the room notices, and no one there knows what the two of them do: that twenty years earlier, as teenagers, Eva and Shane spent one week together.

What the city's Black literary scene also does not know is that the two of them have been answering each other in their books ever since, so that their work has quietly carried on a conversation across two decades. The novel covers the seven days that follow the reunion, and the meeting raises not only the feelings the two of them had put aside but the buried history behind them.

Tia Williams is an American novelist and editor who was raised in Virginia and has lived in Brooklyn since graduating from the University of Virginia in 1997. She has worked for many years as a fashion editor, is editorial director for the Estee Lauder Companies, and her earlier novels include The Accidental Diva (2004) and The Perfect Find (2016).