Thursday, October 23, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
 **From National Book Award finalist Susan Straight, a captivating new novel about a group of nurses fighting through the first year of a pandemic and the beloved California community they will risk their lives to protect** In August 2020, a group of nurses are working in the ICU at a hospital in San Bernardino at the height of a Covid surge: Larette Embers, whose husband, Grief, is an animal control officer; Cherrise Martinez, whose husband died years ago in a car crash, and whose daughter Raquel has been sent to a Coachella date farm to live with her great-aunt to avoid the virus; and Marisol Manalang, born in the Philippines but based in Sacramento. To safeguard their families, the nurses are living in a makeshift RV camp close to the hospital; they share food and cigarettes yet keep their work private. For this is a country in crisis, and they are assisting strangers at the edge of death with infinite tenderness and growing desperation. As the nurses struggle with the skyrocketing number of sick patients, Cherisse’s daughter goes missing. Grief's friend Johnny Frias, a California Highway Patrol officer, joins the search to find her, and the resulting journey leads to new love and loss, pushing all our characters to their breaking points. Brilliantly highlighting both the quiet heroism and extraordinary bravery of first responders, _Sacrament_ once again proves that Susan Straight is the “essential voice in American writing and in writing of the West” (_The New York Times_). **SUSAN STRAIGHT** has published nine novels, including _Mecca_, _A Million Nightingales_, and _Highwire Moon_, and one memoir, _In the Country of Women_. She’s been a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the National Book Award, among other honors, and received the Lannan Prize, the O. Henry Award, the Edgar Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the _Los Angeles Times_ Book Prizes. Her fiction has been translated into ten languages. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family.