Five Smooth Stones is a 1966 novel by Ann Fairbairn, set in the era of the American civil rights movement. The novel's African-American protagonist, David Champlain, was born into the poverty and Jim Crow justice of Depression-era New Orleans. His father was lynched by a white mob and he was raised by his grandparents. David himself is brilliant and lucky and is graduated from a Midwestern college, then Harvard Law School, then Oxford. David and a white woman, Sara Kent, fall in love, but David fears for their future as a mixed-race couple in America. David chooses to practice international law and serve abroad as a diplomat. But the death – perhaps murder – of his grandfather brings David back to New Orleans, where he is plunged into the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement and takes a le