Her sister Andrea, an anthropologist, counseled her on matters of ethnicity and religion.

Her sister Jeanine, an evolutionary biologist, helped her on the medical aspects of the plot. Her sister Leslie, a federal judge, advised her on legal issues. Like so many things about Abrams, the book is partly a family affair, produced in consultation with her five siblings. In common with other Abrams heroines, she is preternaturally talented, with an eidetic, or photographic, memory, a brilliant analytical mind and a knack for attracting and escaping danger. Its heroine is 26-year-old Avery Keene, law clerk to the incapacitated justice, who stumbles into a world of trouble when she is made his legal guardian. Stacey Abrams’s novel “While Justice Sleeps” comes out on May 11. And writing is native to the way I think about the world.” “One thing I am grateful to my parents for is that there was never a moment where they said, ‘Don’t do this.’ What they wanted for us was to explore and try.

“Writing is as much a part of who I am as anything,” Abrams said last month in a video interview from her home in Atlanta.

It is as if the disparate parts of her life - the public-policy part, the nerdy, abstruse-topic part and the popular-culture-consuming part - are finally coalescing. It is hard to imagine that anyone who followed the 2020 election does not know who Stacey Abrams is.Īnd so for her latest book, “ While Justice Sleeps,” a legal thriller about a Supreme Court justice whose descent into a coma plunges the court, and the country, into turmoil, Abrams, 47, has used her own name on a novel for the first time. Eager to keep her worlds separate, she used the nom de plume Selena Montgomery, a homage to the “Bewitched” actress Elizabeth Montgomery.Ībrams went on to write seven more Selena Montgomery books (one of which, “Never Tell,” is in development with CBS), as well as two nonfiction works under her own name, while pursuing her day jobs as a tax lawyer, business owner, state lawmaker, candidate for governor and voting-rights advocate, to name a few. Stacey Abrams published her first book - “ Rules of Engagement,” a romance novel about a brilliant undercover agent and her smoking-hot colleague - while a student at Yale Law School.

Book while justice sleeps