Set against the backdrop of World War II and growing racial tension in Tennessee, Chattanooga finds Mamie Buffon, her seven daughters, two son-in-laws, granddaughter, bed-ridden brother, and two black housekeepers packed together in a highly dysfunctional household fraught with marital, sexual and racial tension. None of them could possibly imagine what the summer of 1944 had in store for them as the novel hurtles towards its dramatic conclusion.