Catherine Adel West

Catherine Adel West is a Chicago novelist whose fiction examines family loyalty, faith, friendship, and the pressures surrounding Black women’s lives. Her 2020 debut, Saving Ruby King, was published by Park Row Books. Chicago’s South Side grounds the story of Ruby King and her closest friend, Layla Potter, whose families are connected through Calvary Hope Christian Church and through histories neither young woman fully understands. West expands the narrative beyond a single viewpoint, allowing parents, children, and the church community to reveal different parts of an intergenerational story. Kirkus highlights the novel’s attention to family secrets and religious authority, while the publisher’s edition identifies it as West’s first book. The Chicago setting is integral to the novel’s social world rather than a generic backdrop. Saving Ruby King established West as a writer of layered domestic fiction, using friendship as both emotional refuge and a means of questioning inherited silence, obligation, and power.