Southern Historical Fiction

1932: Located on the banks of the Gilead River in Minnesota, Lincoln School is home to hundreds of Native American boys and girls who have been separated from their families. The only two white boys in the school are orphan brothers Odie and Albert, who, under the watchful eyes of the cruel superintendent Mrs. Brickman, are often in trouble for misdeeds both real and imagined. The two boys' best friend is Mose, a mute Native American who is also the strongest kid in school. And they find another ally in Cora Frost, a widowed teacher who is raising her little girl, Emmy, by herself.

Storm clouds are approaching Culpeper County, Virginia, in early January 1861. The troublesome Fogarty brothers have been raising havoc across the countryside, and when the local lawman, Will Brannon, returns from another futile attempt to track them down, he finds the townspeople abuzz. South Carolina has seceded from the Union, and rumor has it more states will follow, perhaps even Virginia.

Bertie Jenkins has spent forty years serving as a midwife for her community in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. Out of all the mothers she’s tended, none affects her more than the young teenager who shows up on her doorstep, injured, afraid, and expecting, one warm June day in 1943. As Bertie and her four sisters tenderly nurture Songbird back to health, the bond between the childless midwife and the motherless teen grows strong. But soon Songbird is forced to make a heartbreaking decision that will tear this little family apart.

1969. When Mattie Taylor’s twin brother was killed in Vietnam, she lost her best friend and the only person who really understood her. Now, news that her mother is dying sends Mattie back home, despite blaming her father for Mark’s death. Mama’s last wish is that Mattie would read some old letters stored in a trunk, from people Mattie doesn’t even know. Mama insists they hold the answers Mattie is looking for.

The star-crossed Union officer and Confederate spy find that it is not easy to escape their pasts. On the heels of the battle at Hoover's Gap, James Lockett receives a cryptic message regarding Anna Tucker's whereabouts and impending peril. Will he trust a man who once vowed to kill him? Stymied by General Bragg and the limited passes south through the hills, General Rosecrans and the Union army finally move on Hoover's Gap. Riding with Wilder's new mounted infantry brigade and armed with the experimental repeating Spencer rifle, Lockett and company find surprising success in the seven mile...

The Phantom of the Pavilion by K. A. Wijeratne In the crumbling cricket ground of Maduwila, whispers from the past refuse to fade. When jaded sports journalist Laki Perera stumbles upon a half-forgotten scandal buried beneath the lush spin of Sri Lankan cricket, he finds himself haunted—literally—by the ghost of Ranjith "Rana" Abeysekera, a prodigious spinner whose mysterious death decades ago was written off as disgrace. As Laki joins forces with his estranged daughter Madhavi and fiery investigative reporter Shyamali Peiris, the trio uncover a tangled web of match-fixing, political ...

A drunken mother makes childhood ugly. Jane runs away at sixteen, determined to leave her fraught upbringing in the rearview. Vowing never to return, she hitchhikes to California, right on time for the Summer of Love. Seventeen years later, she looks good on paper: married, grad school, sober, but her carefully constructed life is crumbling. When Mama dies, Jane returns for the funeral, leaving her husband in the dark about her history. Seeing her childhood home and significant people from her youth catapults Jane back to the events that made her the woman she is. She faces down her past ...

Maddie Sykes is a burgeoning seamstress who’s just arrived in Bright Leaf, North Carolina—the tobacco capital of the South—where her aunt has a thriving sewing business. After years of war rations and shortages, Bright Leaf is a prosperous wonderland in full technicolor bloom, and Maddie is dazzled by the bustle of the crisply uniformed female factory workers, the palatial homes, and, most of all, her aunt’s glossiest clientele: the wives of the powerful tobacco executives.

In 1931, the creation of the new Great Smoky Mountains National Park threatens Rosie McCauley’s home. Rosie vows the only way the commission will get her land is if they haul her off in a pine box. When a compromise offers her and her disabled sister the opportunity to stay for Rosie’s lifetime, her acceptance sets her apart from the other mountain folk. And the bond she’s forming with ornithologist and outsider Benton Fuller only broadens the rift. Eighty-five years later, Kieran heads back to the national park to find answers to her great-grandmother’s mysterious death.

America is a barren landscape of smoldering ashes, devoid of life except for those people still struggling to scratch out some type of existence. Amidst this destruction, a father and his young son walk, always toward the coast, but with no real understanding that circumstances will improve once they arrive. Still, they persevere, and their relationship comes to represent goodness in a world of utter devastation.

It was the most remarkable political about-face in American history. During the Civil War, General James Longstreet fought tenaciously for the Confederacy. He was alongside Lee at Gettysburg (and counseled him not to order the ill-fated attacks on entrenched Union forces there). He won a major Confederate victory at Chickamauga and was seriously wounded during a later battle.

1939. Seventeen-year-old Nora Jennings has spent her life secure in the certainty of a bright, happy future - until one night of passion has more catastrophic consequences than she ever could have anticipated. Labelled a moral defective and sectioned under the Mental Deficiency Act, she is forced to endure years of unspeakable cruelty at the hands of those who are supposed to care for her.

In the fall of 1962, twenty-seven-year-old Jemma Barker is desperate to escape her life in Chicago—and the spirits she has always been able to see. When she receives an unexpected job offer from the Duchon family in New Orleans, she accepts, thinking it is her chance to start over. But Jemma discovers that the Duchon family isn’t what it seems. Light enough to pass as white, the Black family members look down on brown-skinned Jemma.

It is 1894 in the remote settlement of Bulawayo, in what later became Southern Rhodesia. Recent immigrants from Ireland, Morris and David Langbourne throw body and soul into rebuilding their previously devastated business. Between Morris' brilliant business acumen and David's almost limitless energy, their future looks very promising as they take massive financial and logistical risks and look forward to a booming business in the backwoods of beyond.

When Minerva Jane Jenkins was just 14 years old, she married a man who moved her to the mountains. He carried with him a small box, which he told her was filled with gold. And when he died 50 years later, he made her promise to keep his secret. She is to tell no one about the box or the treasure it contains. Now 94, Minerva is nearing the end of what has sometimes been a lonely life. But she's kept that secret. Even so, rumors of hidden gold have a way of spreading, and Minerva is visited by a reporter, Del Rankin, who wants to know more of her story.

Cora Miller, a recent widow, moves to St. Augustine in 1875 with her young daughter Emily to start life over as a single mother. She opens a fine millinery shop to court the tastes of the wealthy and become part of the town’s social elite. She succeeds in gaining the hat business of tourists Pamela Worthington and her daughter Judith, as well as, the attention of their family friend, extravagant Sterling Cunningham. But aloof Daniel Worthington, Pamela’s son, is more interested in the Indian captives recently brought to the fort. Daniel Worthington has escorted his mother and sister to ...

Folks in Moab live for ice cream socials, baseball, and the local paper’s weekly gossip column. Sheriff Winston Browne has watched over Moab with a generous eye for a decade, and by now he’s used to handling the daily dramas that keep life interesting for Moab’s quirky residents. But just after Winston receives some terrible, life-altering news, a seemingly mute runaway with no clear origin arrives in Moab. The residents do what they believe is right and take her in - until two suspicious strangers arrive and begin looking for her.

It’s the 1960s in North Carolina, and Lorraine Delford has it all—an upstanding family, a perfect boyfriend, and an idyllic home complete with a white picket fence. Yet every time she looks through her father’s telescope, she dreams of leaving it all behind to go to space. It’s ambitious, but Lorraine has always been exceptional.

For fourteen-year-old Leah Payne, life in her beloved coastal Carolina town is worlds away from the harsh realities of the day. Loyal to her lumberjack father, she knows only of the familiarity of her small community, the magic of the natural world, and the creative intuition that prompts her to march to the beat of her own drum. But when an accident takes her father's life, leaving her an orphan, Leah finds herself cast into a family of strangers whose welcoming façade hides a terrible secret.

The Reaper is a legend, more myth than man: the savior of worlds, the leader of the Rising, the breaker of chains. But the Reaper is also Darrow, born of the red soil of Mars: a husband, a father, a friend. The worlds once needed the Reaper. But now they need Darrow. Because after the dark age will come a new age: of light, of victory, of hope.