What a Wonderful World This Could Be by Lee Zacharias

What a Wonderful World This Could Be by Lee Zacharias

What Alex, illegitimate daughter of an alcoholic novelist and an artist, has always wanted is family. At 15, she falls in love with a 27-year-old photographer, whom she will leave when she comes under the spell of Ted Neal, a charismatic activist on his way to Mississippi for 1964’s Freedom Summer.

That fall Ted organizes a collective that turns to the growing antiwar movement. Ultimately the radical group Weatherman destroys the “family” Alex and Ted have created, and in 1971 Ted disappears while under FBI investigation.

When Ted surfaces eleven years later, Alex must put her life back together in order to discover what true family means.

Finalist in Literary Fiction, 2021 American Fiction Award from American Book Fest

Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction, 2021 NYC Big Book Awards

Included in Best Historical Fiction of 2021, Hungry for Good Books

Lee Zacharias is the author of a collection of short stories, Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night; four novels, What a Wonderful World It Could Be, Across the Great Lake, Lessons, and At Random; and a collection of personal essays, The Only Sounds We Make. She has co-edited an anthology of stories with Luanne Smith and Michael Gills. Runaway was released in the spring of 2020 by Madville Publishing.

She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She is a twotime recipient of North Carolina's Sir Walter Raleigh Award and has won Southern Humanities Review's Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award, Prairie Schooner's Glenna Luschei Award, and two Silver Medals from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (the IPPYs). At Random was a finalist in literary fiction for the 2013 International Book Awards, the National Indie Lit Awards, and the USA Best Book Awards. Across the Great Lake was named a 2019 Michigan Notable Book, received the 2020 Phillip H. McMath Book Award in Fiction, and was a finalist in literary fiction for the 2018 Foreword Indies Book of the Year.

Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals, including, among others, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Five Points, Gettysburg Review, Crab Orchard Review, Outdoor Photographer, and Our State. Ten times her essays have been named Notable Essays of the Year by The Best American Essays, which reprinted her essay "Buzzards" in The Best American Essays 2008.