With everything in their society lined up against them, will Sofie and Ivan be able to beat the odds? Or will their chance at love be destroyed by the tumultuous times they live in?

When Ivan and Sofie meet, they realize that their pasts are intertwined and-with the sparks that fly between them-perhaps their futures will be too. His family escaped from Europe before the horrors of WWII, and Ivan decides to help fight injustice in their new country, even if it goes against all his instincts as a fighter. Ivan Friedman has devoted his life to boxing, loving the finesse of a well-delivered punch and the penance of receiving one.

Sofie’s spent half her life being prim, proper, and reserved-as if that could bring her mother back-but the nonviolent protests happening across the South bring out her inner agitator. Her 2016 novel Let It Shine was inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog, which she read every day.Sofronia Wallis knows that proper Black women don’t court trouble by upending the status quo, but it’s 1961 and the Civil Rights movement is in full swing. Her parents encouraged her insatiable appetite for books and reading. She was born in the Bronx, New York and growing up, divided her time between there and Jersey City, New Jersey. As a child, she bought tabloid romances and changed descriptions of characters' 'ivory' or 'pale' skin to 'brown.' Family Life Cole's husband is French, and the two spend half the year in Martinique. She enjoys listening to science podcasts like La méthode scientifique and La tête au carré, which are both in French. After college, she worked as a production editor of a science journal in Brooklyn. She originally wanted to be a comic book artist. She grew up reading Mary Higgins Clark and Walter Mosley, as well as Anne Rice and Stephen King. Her 2015 sci-fi romance trilogy Off the Grid was picked up through a Twitter pitch contest run through Carina, the digital arm of Harlequin. She has said that When No One Is Watching was inspired by the real-life gentrification she'd witnessed growing up in NYC and New Jersey. Her book When No One Is Watching received the 2021 Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Paperback Original. She has 10,000 followers on Instagram and 20,000 on Twitter. Best-selling author of sci-fi, historical fiction, contemporary romance novels, and thrillers.

Let It Shine by Alyssa Cole