The book’s protagonist is Mary Pat Fennessy, a 42-year-old single mother living in South Boston’s projects. In his latest book, Small Mercies, he tackles that rage-filled summer, setting a fictional story in a very real place and time. Four of his novels - Mystic River, Shutter Island, Gone Baby Gone, and Live by Night - have been adapted into films. Today, he’s a New York Times best-selling author who has written 14 novels, most of them taking place in and around Boston. “It was like, ‘Want a side of rage with your beer?’ It was everywhere.”īorn and raised in Dorchester, Lehane was 9 that blisteringly hot summer. “Rage was everywhere,” Lehane tells Shondaland. The bus carrying the few Black students from Roxbury to South Boston High School was pelted with eggs, bottles, and bricks. On the first day of school that September, most students stayed home. Those most affected lived in the lower-income, working-class neighborhoods of South Boston, Charlestown, Hyde Park, Roxbury, Mattapan, and Dorchester - areas that were already highly segregated and prone to racial violence. That summer, the city was engulfed in violent protests in response to Judge Wendell Arthur Garrity Jr.’s ruling that students from predominantly white schools would be bused to predominantly Black schools, and vice versa, in an effort to desegregate the city’s public school system. That’s the word Dennis Lehane uses when asked to describe his memories of Boston in 1974.
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