GRACE AND MAIN PRESS
Stories that stay with you.
Every story leaves a mark. Every choice carries weight.
Independent Publishing • Texas
Novels by Ida Shoulders
Fiction with memory, faith, family, and consequence.
Come sit on the porch a while.A free Odessa Pruitt story — He Will Be Missed. The first obituary she ever wrote by herself. November 1994, a man nobody in town could stand, and what she found in his composition books after he died.About eight thousand words. Free, always free, and you are welcome to give it away.
I will write when there is a book, and I will not write when there isn’t. No newsletters, no weekly anything. Unsubscribe whenever you like and I will not take it personally.
The Books
Written
A woman with thirty dollars to her name won’t break a ten for a stranger in the rain. Hours later there is a hospital room, and a reckoning, and everything her grandmother tried to tell her about grace comes back around to be settled.
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The Devil You Know
Crystal Carter is fifteen when she is sent to live with the woman whose name has been spoken like a warning her whole life. Who decided this woman was the devil — and what were they covering up when they did?
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The Hammer
He buried his father at ten in the morning and walked out for the title at nine that night. The man who made him was not his father by blood. He was his father by showing up.
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Mother Dear
The block called her Mother Dear. Her own children called her Mama, and for forty-two years the oldest was proud of the difference. Includes book club questions.
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Friends, Family & Foolishness
Jesus was Black in the face and white at the hands and feet. Book one of The Saints of Greater Promise.
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Know Him Yourself
I am fifty-four years old and I have not figured it out. The principles of a godly woman, said plain.
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Grandma and the Box
Bellweather had already decided how Hazel Vale died. Her granddaughter did not believe a word of it. Book one of a trilogy.
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Where I Left Off
She was ten years old the first night. She went back every night she could.
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Somebody Loved This
She has turned down every gift anybody ever tried to hand her. A Christmas novel.
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All books on Amazon
The Odessa Pruitt Mysteries
Survived By a Loving Wife
A dying man came in to write his own obituary. He said there was something he had to put in it. Book one.
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Gone Home to Rest
A man came in to cancel his own obituary. Six weeks later he was dead and Odessa had given her word. Book three.
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Loved By All Who Knew Her
For forty-one years, Miss Odell Tillery sat up nights with the dying. Now she has started saying things out loud. Book four.
Buy on AmazonThe Ruby Jean Turner Mysteries
Puzzle Books
Black Firsts & Forgotten Heroes
Most Black history books give you the same twelve names. This one does not. Forty large-print word searches.
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Ruby Jean's Casino Bus Puzzle Pack
Forty puzzles. One bus. Everybody's business. Large-print word searches.
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Ruby Jean's Casino Bus: More Puzzles
Ruby Jean did not get on that casino bus to solve anybody's mystery. Forty more, large print.
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Third Cousin Once Removed Actually Showed Up
Somebody in this family moved the present. Nobody is confessing.
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Christmas at Grandma's
Christmas is joy, family, food, noise, and somebody asking where the tape went. This book is for the five minutes in between.
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- How I Got Over — a hundred and three years old, the last living founder of her church, and a testimony nobody sitting in it has heard. In development.
- The Brook — Meadowbrook Avenue, Los Angeles. In development.
- The 2 Doors — a companion to The Devil You Know. In development.
About the Press
Grace and Main Press is the imprint of novelist Ida Shoulders. She writes about families and the people who hold them together — the mothers, the fathers who were not fathers by blood, the women a whole town got wrong. She holds a BA and an MA in American history and brings a historian’s attention to ordinary lives.
Available at No Charge
Book club visits, in person or by call. Panels. Writing workshops. Teen writing groups. Donated copies for local author collections.
Write to [email protected].
They Never Told You
A history channel by the author. American history, the parts that got left out. Episode one is Barney Hill — the man who reported the first alien abduction in America, who was a Black postal worker on a New Hampshire road in 1961, and who had a pistol in his coat for reasons that had nothing to do with the sky.