Laurie Hertzel

Ghosts of Fourth Street takes place in Duluth, Minnesota, in the 1960s. It's about family stories, a mostly happy but complicated childhood, the death of a brother, and salvation by books, all told through the eyes of 9-year-old Laurie. Mostly, it is about the importance of stories--family stories and myths, books, the stories we tell ourselves and the stories that we keep hidden. It will be published March 31 by the University of Minnesota Press. And the ghosts in the title? Many of them are real.

The story of how Laurie fell into journalism quite by accident, moving from shy clerk to reporter sent to cover an event in the then-Soviet Union. Winner of a Minnesota Book Award. Newly released in paperback March 2026.

Mayme Sevander's story about how her family left the Upper Midwest for the Soviet Union in the 1930s only to face doom and death.