Southern Historical Fiction

Based on a True Story In the sweltering summer of 1956, Joann “Jo” Hollingsworth was just a barefoot girl with calloused hands and a heart full of dreams. Living in a tiny house packed with thirteen siblings, she never expected to meet her future in a redheaded stranger with a crooked grin and a guitar slung over his shoulder. Bobby Lee Lowe was known around town as a cut-up—always quick with a joke and a tune. But when he showed up to help build the Hollingsworth family’s new church, he found something more than hard work and hymns. He found Jo. From front-porch dances and letters ...

Carla Damron weaves the stories of four people in Columbia, South Carolina, whose seemingly disparate existences intersect through tragedies realized and tragedies averted. Lena Hastings survived breast cancer and marital infidelity but now faces an uncertain future and crises with her teenaged daughter Becca without the support of the one person she has always counted on.

Set in Alabama in the early '80s, Family Law follows a young lawyer, Lucia, who is making a name for herself at a time when a woman in a courtroom is still a rarity. She's received plenty of threats for her work extricating women and children from troubled relationships, but her own happy marriage has always felt far removed from her work. When her mother's pending divorce brings teenaged Rachel into Lucia's orbit, Rachel finds herself captivated not only with Lucia, but with the change Lucia represents.

"I was born a slave, as was my father before me, but I shall die a free man." Thus begins the poignant story of Samuel Washburn, born a slave in 1850. A young master's cruelty leads to an unforeseen confrontation, which results in Sam and his cousin fleeing the plantation for their lives. They run north to freedom, only to return the South to fight for the greater cause in the Civil War.

Shay O’Donnell traveled across the Atlantic to escape the famine and poverty in Ireland. Sold into servitude by her father, she has little chance for freedom or marriage in the new land. She never expected a stolen kiss could turn her entire life upside down and give her hope for the future.

Following a daring rescue, Jack Aubrey accepts a new command and a new commission to a far-flung destination. Ahead of him and his crew are the new sights and smells of the Indian subcontinent, and the terrifying hazards of an archipelago of islands in the East Indies, where their French enemies have near overwhelming superiority.

Daisy Arnsby is the ugly duckling of the large Arnsby family. Destined to be alone. When a handsome schoolmate asks her to sign a promise that she’ll wed him on her 25th birthday, she jumps at the chance. She hopes, but never dares to dream, that he’d come back. Elias Laury fears his towering height excludes him from ever convincing Daisy to return his love, so he tricks her into waiting for him. But when he returns to collect his bride, he finds that she’s not willing to settle for a marriage of convenience.

Aurora Haverwood has loved Zachery Saberton for as long as she can remember. Her dreams of being his wife are cruelly dashed when the American Civil War draws to a close with news that Zach is missing and presumed dead. Refusing to believe he will never return, she sets out to find the truth. Captain Zach Saberton, notorious blockade runner for the Confederate Navy, has outfoxed the Yankee War Department once too often. To save his neck, Zach agrees to go undercover in London to help the Union recover a million dollars’ worth of gold missing from the failed Confederate Treasury.

Eva Arnsby can’t stay indoors, her need to draw the woodland creatures around her home near Lead, South Dakota gets her in a heap of trouble. And none more troublesome than a shadowy stranger who steals her notebook and her spirit. Ranger, Captain George Roth, is suspicious when he finds a small woman in man’s trousers sneaking around in the woods. Determined to discover the woman’s secrets, he takes on an assignment, ready to investigate her under the guise of a harmless town dandy.

Against a background of industrial unrest, misery, suspicion, jealousy, and the deaths of family and dear friends, the star-crossed love between mill owner John Thornton and the cultivated Margaret Hale is put to the test.

The summer of 1966 burned hot across America but nowhere hotter than the cotton fields of Mississippi. Finding herself in a precarious position as a black woman living alone, Bernice accepts her brother Floyd’s invitation to join him as a servant for a white family, and she enters the web of hostility and deception that is the Kern plantation household.

Uneasiness permeated Chattanooga where Mary Beth Roper grew up. Every conversation she overheard is heated, yet her banker-father was hesitant to reveal the facts. Will Tennessee secede and force them into a war? She was an adult and demanded he tell her the truth, yet she feared the heated politics she’d seen. Then she learned a rogue customer threatened their bank. Somehow, she must find a way to work with Peter Chandler, her father’s partner, even though she can’t bear to be near him. As she unraveled an impossible puzzle, she learned to value her faith.

Self-educated and brown skinned, Cassie works full time in her grandmother's laundry in rural Mississippi. Illiterate and white, Judith falls for "colored music" and dreams of life as a big-city radio star. These teenage girls are half-sisters. And when they catch wind of their wayward father's inheritance coming down in Virginia, they hitch their hopes on a road trip together to claim what's rightly theirs. In an old junk car, with a frying pan, a ham, and a few dollars hidden in a shoe, they set off through the Deep South of the 1950s.

London, 1941. After losing her family to a Nazi bomb attack back home in Ireland, Sarah Gillespie joins the British Secret Services to bring them justice. Partnered with American undercover agent Lieutenant Tony Anderson, Sarah embarks on a dangerous mission that takes her from war-torn London into the black mountains of Wales. But when one of her team is revealed to be a German mole and enemies begin to close in, what price will Sarah have to pay to save her country—and herself?

Constantly moving, from South Africa to the Persian Gulf, to Rhodesia, to England, and ultimately to suburban New Jersey, the Laments are a quirky and lovable family who live by the motto "anywhere but here." The main character, Will Lament, whom the Laments take home from the hospital as a result of a bizarre mix-up, grows up feeling that he doesn't belong.

It’s 1962, and Violet Romero, a young woman searching for peace after a horrible tragedy, finds herself in an unexpected place—managing funerals at Berwick, an antebellum mansion-turned-mortuary in Lexington, Kentucky. Her employer, Henry Pendleton, a botany-obsessed mortician, seems harmless, but Violet believes that he is hiding something. Following her instincts, Violet discovers a hidden room in Berwick that offers a glimpse into the mansion’s dark past. Violet soon understands that a reckoning is coming to Henry’s life, and she is caught in the rising tide of revenge.

An award-winning Southern historical romance combining a sweet love story with elements of suspense and an underlying theme about the importance of forgiveness. Amid the revitalized social scene of a recovering South, Laura has to sacrifice one of her most precious desires in order to protect someone she loves above all else. Can Laura make her enemies become allies as she confronts her secret? Will she find the strength to forgive as well as to love again?

Set against the backdrop of the antebellum South, this compelling work of historical fiction follows the harrowing journey of a young man, stolen from his family and thrust into the merciless world of slavery. The story unfolds with the abduction of IDI, a bright and resourceful young man who is cruelly torn from his family and homeland. His journey takes him to the American South, where he is subjected to the dehumanizing horrors of servitude. Driven by an unshakable determination to regain his freedom, David befriends a group of fellow slaves who share his longing for escape.

In rural North Georgia two decades after the Civil War, 13-year-old Lulu Hurst reaches high into her father's bookshelf and pulls out an obscure book, The Truth of Mesmeric Influence. Deemed gangly and undesirable, Lulu wants more than a lifetime of caring for her disabled baby brother, Leo, with whom she shares a profound and supernatural mental connection.

For many years, Max Porter and his team have been caught between Mother Hope and Grandma Mobley, two witches that hated each other for over a century. Both witches hold power and both are dangerous. But now, their hatred has finally boiled over, and that power is about to be unleashed. Now, Max finds himself the rope in a tug-o-war that threatens to destroy his budding family, if not all of North Carolina. He will have to risk everything he knows and loves, push himself further than ever before. Because Max Porter will be in the fight of his life. And his death.