In 2021, Ashton Lattimore, an award-winning journalist and former lawyer, became a participant in the Black Creatives Fund Revisions Workshop. Today, Ballantine Books is excited to release Lattimore’s first novel, ALL WE WERE PROMISED. ALL WE WERE PROMISED tells the story of a housemaid with a dangerous family secret as she conspires with a wealthy young abolitionist to help an enslaved girl escape, in volatile pre-Civil War Philadelphia. The narrative is told through the perspectives of three women in vastly different circumstances – the rebel, the socialite, and the fugitive – risking everything for one another in an American city straining to live up to its loftiest ideals. Publishers Weekly says, “[Lattimore] provides a textured view of such historical events as the building of Pennsylvania Hall as a meeting place for the antislavery movement and its subsequent burning by an angry antiabolitionist mob. Lattimore is a writer to watch.”   Continue reading →