Description: It was called "The City Too Busy to Hate", but two decades ago more than forty black children were murdered there with grim determination, their bodies found -- in ditches, on riverbanks -- strangled, beaten, and sexually assaulted. Bambara was living in Atlanta at the time, and in this novel set against the backdrop of those terrible events she powerfully dramatizes the story of one black family surviving on the margins of a seemingly prosperous city.

On Sunday morning, July 20, 1980, Marzala Rawls Spencer awakens to find that her teenage son is missing, even as the Atlanta child abductions are beginning to be reported. As she and her estranged husband frantically search for their son, the story moves with authority through the full spectrum of Atlanta's political, social, and cultural life, illuminating the vexing issues of race and class that bedevil the city.

Suspenseful, richly dramatic, profoundly affecting, "Those Bones Are Not My Child" explores the complex relationships within one family in dire crisis. And as Toni Morrison, who edited Bambara's manuscript, has observed, it is also "the narrative revelation of a major Southern city of the '80s, a revelation of what clogs the bloodstream of 'The City Too Busy to Hate.'"

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