Jean Dickey dreams of doing something important for women's rights. She failed in 1970, but now she's in her seventies and has a second chance. Her granddaughter, Dani, arrives to help her start a civil rights center on Chicago's Lower West Side. But when a cold-case crime on the center's deteriorating property is connected to Jean, and Jean talks about visits from her grandmother's ghost, Dani faces a difficult decision about Jean's future.

Eighteenth and Western is upmarket book club fiction. It tells the stories of three women, each in a different era-1920, 1970, and present-day-struggling for rights and fulfillment. Their situations are dissimilar, but their lives are parallel. Eighteenth and Western is, at its core, an account of grandmothers and granddaughters and the strength, suffering, and resilience passed down through generations.