At the center of the story is Kassima, a young woman mourning her husband and sons, victims of Pittsburgh's violent streets. In her grief, she allows no one to get close to her -- until she is tripped up by a passionate affair with gentle Robert Jones. When violence threatens his life too, she retreats. But the two are reunited by the death of Kassima's tenant, old Mr. Mallory, a self-educated eccentric who roamed the streets with his ancient camera in a shopping bag. Mallory's legacy is a box of photographs he brought from Philadelphia that hauntingly document a half-century of African American history. After he dies, the pictures provide Kassima with an unexpected means of healing her own neighborhood's wounds and finding her way back to love.

Narrated in the blues-toned voices of its three main characters, Two Cities recalls both the gripping drama of Wideman's Philadelphia Fire and the emotional depth of his memoir Fatheralong. With its indelible images of confrontation and outrage, matched in equal measure by lasting impression of hope, Two Cities is a compassionate, lacerating, and nourishing novel.