For Stacey Abrams, politics and storytelling overlap

STACEY ABRAMS wrote her first novel at 14. It was a soul-searching tale called “My Diary of Angst”. “I was very tortured as a teenager,” she recalls with a laugh. There is nothing tortured about Ms Abrams now. At 47, she is a champion of voting rights and a household name across America. She is widely credited with swinging the state of Georgia to the Democrats, helping to send Joe Biden to the White House and two Democratic newcomers—one black, one Jewish—to the Senate. Even among her admirers, few may have realised that, in her spare time, she was still writing novels.

The secret is out with the publication of “While Justice Sleeps”, a political thriller about a Supreme Court justice in a coma and his mixed-race clerk, Avery Keene, who must save both him and the world. It follows eight romance novels written under the pen-name Selena Montgomery, which Ms Abrams began at Yale Law School and continued in the early years of her career as a lawyer and legislator in Atlanta.