Ann B. Ross

Thurs., May 16, 2013, 12pm
@ The Lazy Goat
$55 ticket: one person, one book / $80 ticket: two people, one book*
Purchase signed books.
Event status: Sorry you missed it!

Ann B. Ross, the author of the beloved Miss Julia series, is returning to Greenville for another Book Your Lunch event with us. In Miss Julia Stirs Up Trouble (Viking, hardcover, $26.95), the 14th book in the series, Miss Julia cooks up a batch of fun.

*Each ticket includes one hardcover copy of Miss Julia Stirs Up Trouble, which can be picked up at Fiction Addiction after April 9th, or it can be brought to the event for you.

With a crisp bite in the air, Miss Julia is enjoying a well-earned respite by her new fireplace. But autumn leaves aren’t the only things falling: James, Hazel Marie’s housekeeper, has had a nasty tumble down some stairs.

How can Hazel Marie feed and take care of him—not to mention a husband and two babies— when she barely knows how to boil water?

Miss Julia jumps in to help by convincing the ladies of Abbotsville to put on their aprons and give cooking lessons. With success so close she can taste it, Miss Julia isn’t thrilled when an unexpected visitor shows up. Brother Vern Puckett, Hazel Marie’s no-good uncle, started life on the wrong foot and stayed there. What could he possibly want from his frazzled niece this time?

With a delightful helping of madcap antics, Miss Julia Stirs Up Trouble is a perfect next course in this charming series.

About the author:
Ann B. Ross holds a doctorate in English from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and has taught literature at the University of North Carolina-Asheville. She is the author of thirteen previous novels featuring the popular Southern heroine Miss Julia. She has three children and six grandchildren and lives in Hendersonville, North Carolina.

Denise Kiernan

Fri., May 10th, 2013, 12pm
@ City Range, $25 per person
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Event status: Sorry you missed it!

Denise Kiernan explores the mysteries and inner workings of the Manhattan Project through the unique experiences of half a dozen young women who worked in a variety of roles, from secretaries, statisticians and nurses to janitorial staff, calutron cubicle operators and chemists in her new book, The Girls of Atomic City (Touchstone, hardcover, $27.00, on sale March 5, 2013).

Imagine boarding a bus or a train knowing that your destination was a total mystery.  The only thing you’ve been told is that your work there will help end World War II, and that everything will be taken care of for you.  This was the case for thousands of young women who were recruited by the U.S. government in 1943 to serve the top-secret Manhattan Project.  They came from all across the East Coast and the South, from Alabama to Western Pennsylvania, from New Jersey to tiny towns like Clinton, Tennessee.  It turned out their destination was “Site X”, or Oak Ridge, a secret city that appeared on no maps.  The individuals who worked there, though they had no idea at the time, were enriching uranium for the first atomic bomb used in combat.

Kiernan shares the never-before-told, true story of these remarkable, hardworking, determined young women and the crucial role they played in one of the most significant moments in U.S. history. For many women, working in Oak Ridge was their first taste of independence, their first time away from home.  Some had just finished high school, others had college degrees, but all were bound together by a shared spirit of survival, purpose, and sisterhood.

Starting in 1942, Oak Ridge was transformed almost overnight from a ramshackle mud-pit in the southern Appalachians to a bustling secret city of 75,000 people by 1945.  Gates and security fencing encircled the town and inside there were watchtowers, armed guards, undercover informants and propaganda to remind workers “What you do here, What you see here, What you hear here, please let it stay here.” Workers were given only the absolute minimum information necessary to perform their jobs, nothing more.  And some of those who talked to others about even the most innocuous details of their work, might find themselves quickly out of a job and dismissed from the city, sometimes overnight.

Yet, despite the shroud of secrecy, workers in Oak Ridge kept themselves busy with Saturday night dances on the Townsite’s tennis courts, movies, sports teams and every kind of club imaginable. And with the surplus of handsome army men, scientists and doctors, romance blossomed in Oak Ridge and many single girls soon became married women.

Kiernan’s deeply researched portrait of these unsung World War II workers is based on interviews with dozens of surviving women and other Oak Ridge residents. The book also includes a 16-page photo insert with fascinating, evocative photos of daily life in Oak Ridge from Ed Westcott, the official U.S. Government photographer during World War II. As this beautifully told, suspenseful story unfolds, readers slowly start to understand the magnitude and implications of the Manhattan Project.  When the atomic bomb known as “Little Boy” detonated above Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the women realized for the first time the work being done in Oak Ridge, they experienced a varied, complex range of emotions.

Like Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Kiernan’s The Girls of Atomic City is history and science made fresh and vibrant—ensuring that the experiences and contributions of these astounding women will never be forgotten.

About the author:

Denise Kiernan is the author of Signing Their Lives Away and Signing Their Rights Away. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Discover, Ms., Reader’s Digest and other national publications.

In her own words:

I am a writer and producer. I write books and scripts of my own, I ghost write, I write for adults and I write for kids, occasionally with my husband, author Joseph D’Agnese. I started out in journalism and have covered everything from women’s issues, sports and history to food, travel and education in places like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Saveur, Discover, Ms., Reader’s Digest, and others. I worked as head writer for ABC’s “Who Wants to be a  Millionaire” during its Emmy award-winning first season and have produced for ESPN, MSNBC and a variety of independent productions.

There are a lot of other projects in various stages of development, but hey—a little mystery goes a long way.

Patti Callahan Henry

Tues., May 7, 2013 from 12-2pm
@ Twigs Tempietto, $25 per person
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Event status: Sorry you missed it!

New York Times bestselling Southern author Patti Callahan Henry‘s new novel, And Then I Found You (St. Martin’s Griffin, hardcover, $24.99, available April 9, 2013), gives new life to the phrase “inspired by a true story.” By traveling back to a painful time in her own family’s history, the author explores the limits of courage, and the price of a selfless act.

Kate Vaughan is no stranger to tough choices.

She’s made them before. Now it’s time to do it again.

Kate has a secret, something tucked away in her past. But she’s getting on with her life.  Her business is thriving. She has a strong relationship with her family, and a devoted boyfriend whom she wants to love with all her heart. If Kate had ever made a list, Rowan would fill the imagined boxes of a perfect mate. But she wants more than the perfect-on-paper relationship; she wants a real and imperfect love. That’s why, when Kate discovers the small velvet box hidden in Rowan’s drawer, she panics.

It always happens this way. Just when Kate thinks she can love, just when she believes she can conquer the fear, she’s filled with dread. And she wants more than anything to make this feeling go away. But how?

When the mistakes have been made and the running is over, it’s time to face the truth. Kate knows this. She understands that there are some things that can never be undone. Yet, for the first time in her life she also knows that she won’t fully love until she confronts those from her past. It’s time to act.

Can she do it? Can she travel to the place where it all began, to the one who shares her secret? Can the lost ever become found?

About the author:

New York Times bestselling author Patti Callahan Henry has published nine novels: Losing the Moon, Where the River Runs, When Light Breaks, Between the Tides, The Art of Keeping Secrets, Driftwood Summer, The Perfect Love Song, Coming up for Air and the upcoming And Then I Found You.

Patti is hailed as a fresh new voice in Southern fiction. She has been shortlisted for the Townsend Prize for Fiction and has twice been nominated for the Southeastern Independent Booksellers Fiction Novel of the Year. She is a frequent speaker at luncheons, book clubs, and women’s groups, where she discusses the importance of storytelling and anything else they want to talk about.

Patti grew up as a minister’s daughter, learning early how storytelling affects our lives. She spent many summers on Cape Cod where she began her love affair with the beach, ocean, tides, and nature of the coast. Moving south at the tender age of twelve, she met a southern boy who later proposed on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, next to a historic lighthouse overlooking the Sound.

After earning her Master’s degree in Child Health, Patti worked as a Clinical Nurse Specialist until her first child was born. Patti is a full-time writer, wife and mother living with her husband and three children in Mountain Brook, Alabama.

Therese Fowler

Tues., April 23, 2013 from 12-2pm
@ Twigs Tempietto, $25 per person
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Event status: Sorry you missed it!

North Carolina author Therese Fowler‘s new novel, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (St. Martin’s, hardcover, $25.99, releases 3/26/13), combines magnificent research with a novelist’s vision. Fowler has recast Zelda Fitzgerald in the public imagination, bringing to full, irresistible life a beautiful young woman who is as vulnerable as she is charming.

“I wish I could tell everyone who thinks we’re ruined, Look closer…and you’ll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed.”

When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the “ungettable” Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn’t wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner’s, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and take the rest as it comes.

What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined attention and success and celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda legends in their own time. Everyone wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel—and his witty, perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, adopts daring new fashions, and revels in this wild new world. Each place they go becomes a playground: New York City, Long Island, Hollywood, Paris, and the French Riviera—where they join the endless party of the glamorous, sometimes doomed Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Gertrude Stein.

Everything seems new and possible. Troubles, at first, seem to fade like morning mist. But not even Jay Gatsby’s parties go on forever. Who is Zelda, other than the wife of a famous—sometimes infamous—husband? How can she forge her own identity while fighting her demons and Scott’s, too? With brilliant insight and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler brings us Zelda’s irresistible story as she herself might have told it.

About the author:
Therese Fowler has believed in the magic of a good story since she learned to read at the age of four. At age thirty, as a newly single parent, she put herself through college, earning a degree in sociology before deciding to scratch her longtime fiction-writing itch. That led to an MFA in creative writing, and the composition of stories that explore the nature of our families, our culture, our mistakes, and our desires.

Therese is the author of three previous novels, Exposure, Souvenir and Reunion, which have been published internationally, in nine languages and more than twenty-eight countries to date.

She lives in Wake Forest, NC, with her supportive husband and sons, and four indifferent but agreeable cats.

William Kent Krueger

Saturday, April 13th, 2013, 12 pm
@ The Lazy Goat, $25 per person
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Event status: Sorry you missed it!

Meet William Kent Krueger, New York Times bestselling author of 14 books.  His brilliant new novel, Ordinary Grace (Atria, hardcover, $24.99, on sale 3/26/13), begins with a young man, a small town, and a murder in the summer of 1961.

New Bremen, Minnesota, 1961. The Twins were playing their debut season, ice-cold root beers were selling out at the soda counter of Halderson’s Drugstore, and Hot Stuff comic books were a mainstay on every barbershop magazine rack. It was a time of innocence and hope for a country with a new, young president. But for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum it was a grim summer in which death visited frequently and assumed many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder.

Frank begins the season preoccupied with the concerns of any teenage boy, but when tragedy unexpectedly strikes his family, which includes his Methodist minister father, his artistic mother, his Juilliard-bound older sister, and his wise-beyond-his-years kid brother—he finds himself thrust into an adult world full of secrets, lies, adultery, and betrayal, suddenly called upon to demonstrate a maturity and gumption beyond his years.

Ordinary Grace is a heartfelt and gripping coming-of-age tale.  Although the story has elements of mystery to it, it is a bit of a departure for Krueger, a multi award-winning crime writer best known for his critically acclaimed Cork O’Connor series.  Says the author, “I didn’t construct it with a tight narrative in the way that a book written strictly in the crime genre would demand.”  Instead Krueger focused on creating a particular time—the summer of 1961—and a particular place—a small town deep in the heart of the Minnesota River valley—that have allowed him to examine memories and emotions arising from his own adolescence, and to explore themes that have been important to him all his life.  He writes, “This wasn’t intended to be a memoir and it isn’t at all, but because I tapped the deep roots of my own experience to create the fiction, I felt the power of the story from the very first words of the very first sentence: All the dying that summer began with the death of a child….”

The child in question is Bobby Cole, a sweet-looking, simple kid cut down by a train speeding along the tracks by the river’s edge just outside town.  And more deaths follow, including one that tears at the heart of young Frank’s family.

Told from Frank’s perspective forty years after that fateful summer, Ordinary Grace is a brilliantly moving story about a boy standing at the door of his young manhood, trying to understand a world that seems to be falling apart around him.    It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God.

Fiction Addiction is proud to have nominated Ordinary Grace as an Indie Next pick. Our reader says, “Ordinary Grace is a beautifully written, atmospheric novel that is both a coming-of-age story and an homage to life in a small Midwestern town in the 1960s.  It is a quiet, simple story with a huge message and wonderfully developed characters. While there is a murder, the identity of the perpetrator is secondary to how the residents and family members are affected by all the events of the summer of 1961.” -Nancy McFarlane, Fiction Addiction

About the author:

William Kent Krueger is the award-winning author of twelve previous Cork O’Connor novels, including Northwest Angle and Trickster’s Point, as well as the novel Ordinary Grace. He lives in the Twin Cities with his family.

In his own words:

Call me Kent.

I was born November 16, 1950 in Torrington, Wyoming, the third of four children whose parents convinced them that they had gypsy blood flowing through their veins. Before I graduated from high school, I’d lived in eleven different houses, in eight different cities, in six different states. By the time I was old enough to know what’s what, I realized that we simply moved every time the rent was due. Some of my best years were spent in Hood River, Oregon, so when people ask where I’m from, I usually lay that “honor” on Oregon.

I attended Stanford University for one year. In the turbulent spring of 1970, I understood the administration and I didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of political issues. For example, they didn’t look kindly on my participation in a takeover of the president’s office in protest of what I saw as the University’s complicity in weapons production during the Vietnam War. Not only did they sic the riot police on me, they evaporated my academic scholarship, forcing me to leave after my freshman year. Which was okay by me. I’d met the woman I knew I wanted to marry, and she lived in Nebraska. So I headed east.

Over the next few years, I logged a bit of timber, worked a lot of construction, published a few magazine articles, and generally enjoyed life. I married—that lovely Cornhusker named Diane—and we pretty much had a ball.

Then we conceived our first child, a daughter whose name would be Seneca, and we had to get serious about life. In the summer of 1980, we moved to St. Paul, Minnesota so that Diane could attend law school. Talk about Hell. She gave birth to our second child, Adam, in the first semester of her final year—and still made the Dean’s List.

It was during this period of time that I began to write in earnest and to develop the habits that became the basis for the writing discipline I follow to this day.

Speaking of his new novel, Krueger says:

I love Ordinary Grace—maybe too much. I’ve been telling my audiences this fall that I’m trying to prepare myself to have my heart broken when the book is released.  Why?  Readers can be stubborn, and I’m afraid that those of you who are ardent fans of my series will be reluctant to accept a book that doesn’t have Cork O’Connor anywhere in the story.  My deep hope is that you’ll be willing to take a risk and give this novel a try.  Honest to God, I’ve put everything I know about storytelling into this book.  I believe absolutely that if you read it, you won’t be disappointed.  And I’ll even go a step further.  I believe that if you read this book, you’ll fall in love with it, too.

Kim Boykin

Wed., April 3rd, 2013, 12pm
@ Twigs Tempietto, $25 per person
Purchase signed books.
Event status: Sorry you missed it!

Kim Boykin brings a powerful new voice to Southern fiction in her debut novel, The Wisdom of Hair (Berkley, paperback, $15, on sale March 5, 2013). This compelling tale of small-town Southern living is about one young woman’s struggle for change amidst impossible odds, and how her quest for love leads her to find friendship, real love and finally forgiveness.

Life can be beautiful, but it takes a little work…

“The problem with cutting your own hair is that once you start, you just keep cutting, trying to fix it, and the truth is, some things can never be fixed. The day of my daddy’s funeral, I cut my bangs until they were the length of those little paintbrushes that come with dime-store watercolor sets. I was nine years old. People asked me why I did it, but I was too young then to know I was changing my hair because I wanted to change my life.”

In 1983, on her nineteenth birthday, Zora Adams finally says goodbye to her alcoholic mother and their tiny town in the mountains of South Carolina. Living with a woman who dresses like Judy Garland and brings home a different man each night is not a pretty existence, and Zora is ready for life to be beautiful.

With the help of a beloved teacher, she moves to a coastal town and enrolls in the Davenport School of Beauty. Under the tutelage of Mrs. Cathcart, she learns the art of fixing hair, and becomes fast friends with the lively Sara Jane Farquhar, a natural hair stylist. She also falls hard for handsome young widower Winston Sawyer, who is drowning his grief in bourbon, and Zora believes she can save him in a way she never could save her mother.

As Zora practices finger waves, updos, and spit curls, she also comes to learn that few things are permanent in this life—except real love, lasting friendship, and, ultimately… forgiveness.

This poignant debut novel about the quest for change and the desire for a better life is something all women can relate to.  Boykin’s authentic Southern voice and ability to create strong yet flawed female characters is certain to appeal to fans of Karen White, Beth Hoffman, and Susan Gregg Gilmore.

About the author:

Kim Boykin is a women’s fiction author with a sassy Southern streak. Her debut novel, The Wisdom of Hair, explores the camaraderie in beauty school and the holy connection that exists between stylists and their clients. The book is also based on the truth that women believe if they can change their hair, whether for a week, a moment, or a lifetime–they can change their lives.  Kim learned about women and their hair in her mother’s beauty shop in a tiny South Carolina town. She loves to write stories about strong Southern women, because that’s what she knows.

Kim is an accomplished public speaker, serves on the board of the South Carolina Writer’s Workshop, and edits the organization’s monthly newsletter. While her heart is always in South Carolina, she lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband, three dogs, and 126 rose bushes.

The Lee Bros.

Wed., March 20th, 2013, 12pm
@ The Lazy Goat, $65*
Purchase signed books/ View Menu Inspired by the Cookbook
Event status: Sorry you missed it!

In The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen (Clarkson Potter, hardcover, $35.00, on sale February 26, 2013), award-winning cookbook authors Matt Lee and Ted Lee bring to life the cuisine of this vibrant Southern city in a narrative-with-recipes that will resonate with food lovers and cultural explorers wherever they may live.

*Each ticket includes one hardcover copy of The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen, which can be picked up at the store after 2/26/13 or can be brought to the event for you.

Over the past five years, Charleston, SC, has emerged as one of the country’s hottest food destinations. And for most visitors, the points of entry to the city’s culinary life are its award-winning restaurants. But there’s a larger story to be told about the area’s food community—about the home cooks and restaurant chefs, plus a host of food sages and flat-out eccentrics who have made the town such a compelling place to cook and dine out in today.

Raised in Charleston from the time they were small boys, Matt and Ted learned to shuck oysters and pick blue crabs as kids and to watch for the day in April when the loquats on street trees ripened. The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen is their story of how growing up and living in the Holy City made them the cookbook writers they are today. Included here are classic recipes like Charleston Okra Soup and Smothered Pork Chops, rendered for today’s home kitchens. There are recipe-tributes to key players in the town’s food history: Flounder in Parchment with Shaved Vegetables is an homage to the dish that was Edna Lewis’s signature during her tenure at Middleton Place; Henry’s Cheese Spread is a peppery dip from a mid-century brasserie beloved by locals. And here are delicious seasonal drinks inspired by Charleston’s fruit harvest: Muscadine Sangria, Loquat Manhattans, and Kumquat Margaritas. Rounding out the book are a complete bibliography of Charleston cookbooks and maps of driving and walking tours corresponding to the recipes.

With 100 recipes, 75 color photographs, and numerous personal stories, The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen will make every reader an instant insider to this vibrant food culture, and will have home cooks whipping up Shrimp and Grits and Huguenot Torte like locals. The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen gives readers the most intimate portrayal yet of the cuisine of this exciting Southern city, one that will resonate with food lovers wherever they live. And for visitors to Charleston, the indispensable walking and driving tours related to recipes in the book bring this food town to life like never before.

About the authors:

Siblings Matt and Ted grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. When they left to attend colleges in the Northeast, they so missed the foods of their hometown that they founded The Lee Bros. Boiled Peanuts Catalogue, a mail-order catalogue for Southern pantry staples like stone-ground grits, fig preserves, and, of course, boiled peanuts. When an editor of a travel magazine asked them to write a story about road-tripping their home state in search of great food, they embarked on a second career as food and travel journalists. They have also written two previous groundbreaking cookbooks, The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-be Southerners, and The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern: Knockout Dishes with Down-Home Flavor. They currently write food stories for Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, GQ, The New York Times, and they are contributors to the Cooking Channel show Unique Eats.

Jessica Maria Tuccelli

Wed., March 6, 2013, 12 pm
@ The Lazy Goat, $25 per person
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Event status: Sorry you missed it!

Jessica Maria Tuccelli reveals deep insight into the ties that bind people together across immeasurable hardships and distances in her debut novel, Glow (Penguin, paperback, $16.00 on sale 2/26/2013). “Fans of The Help, this one’s for you: A tale of ghosts, slavery, racism and redemption wrapped up in an epic testament to the power of maternal love.”
- Ladies Home Journal

On the eve of World War II, young Ella McGee sits on a bus bound for her Southern hometown. Behind her in Washington, D.C., lie the broken pieces of her parents’ love story – a black father drafted; an activist mother of Scotch-Irish and Cherokee descent confronting racist thugs.

But Ella’s journey is just beginning when she reaches Hopewell County, and her disappearance into the Georgia mountains will stir up memories long suppressed.

As the secrets of Ella’s family history unfold in a vivid generational saga, Glow transports us to the Blue Ridge frontier of 1836, where slave plantations adjoin the haunted glades of a razed Cherokee Nation. Ron Rash’s Appalachia cascades into Alice Walker’s Georgia red clay in this lushly written debut announcing a major new voice in Southern fiction.

About the author:

Jessica Maria Tuccelli is a writer, filmmaker, and women’s welfare advocate. Her debut novel, Glow (Viking 2012), was named a Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Okra Pick, its highest honor. In film, Tuccelli’s lighting finesse can be seen in over 100 commercials, film shorts, and documentaries, most notably the Emmy Award-winning How Do You Spell God? (HBO), Sesame Street (PBS), The American Experience (PBS), and Zoom (WBGH). Tuccelli’s commitment to women’s empowerment began as leader of the Association of Women Students at MIT and continues today with her involvement with Women for Women International, a philanthropic organization dedicated to helping women in war torn regions rebuild their lives. Tuccelli travels the globe, where she finds inspirations for her stories.

Jean Hunt

Wed., February 27, 2013, 12pm
@ Twigs Tempietto, $25 per person
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Event status: Sorry you missed it!

Greenville children’s author Jean Hunt has written Book 3 in the continuing story of adventurous pals Mattie and Bogie, in her new book, Pirate Tales and Musical Trails: Bogey, Mattie and Tucker Discover Hidden Treasure (United Writers Press, paperback, $15.00).

Shelley Shepard Gray

Mon., February 18th, 2013, 12pm
@ The Lazy Goat, $25 per person
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Event status: Sorry you missed it!

In Daybreak, the first book in the new Days of Redemption series from Shelley Shepard Gray (Avon Inspire, paperback, $12.99, on sale 2/12/13), we meet the Keims, a close-knit Amish family whose many dark secrets are about to be exposed.

This exciting new series from beloved author of Amish romance Shelley Shepard Gray delves into the workings of three generations of an Amish family, where nothing is as perfect as it seems.

When Viola Keim starts working at a nearby Mennonite retirement home, she strikes up an unlikely friendship with resident Atle, whose only living relative, his son Edward, is living as a missionary in Nicaragua. Viola understands the importance of mission work, but she can’t imagine leaving her father in the hands of strangers. Even though her family is New Order Amish, it’s not the Amish way, and though she doesn’t know Ed, she judges him for abandoning his father.

But when Ed surprises his father with a visit, Viola and Ed both discover an attraction they never expected.  Despite Viola’s feelings, choosing Ed would mean moving to a far-off country and leaving her family behind. She can’t do that. Her twin sister, Elsie, is going blind and will need someone to care for her all her life. Her family is reeling with the recent discovery that her grandmother hid her past as an Englischer. Her father seems forgetful and distracted—and to be harboring some secrets of his own.

Does Viola dare leave them all behind and forge her own life? Or will family ties mean her one chance at love slips away?

About the author:

Since 2000, Shelley has sold over forty novels to numerous publishers, including HarperCollins, Harlequin, and Abingdon Press. She has been interviewed by NPR, and her books have been highlighted in numerous publications, including USA Today and The Wall Street Journal.

Under the name Shelley Shepard Gray, Shelley writes Amish romances for HarperCollins’ inspirational line, Avon Inspire. Her recent novel, The Protector, the final book in her Families of Honor series, hit the New York Times list, and her previous novel in the same series, The Survivor, appeared on the USA Today bestseller list. Shelley has won the prestigious Holt Medallion for her books, Forgiven and Grace, and her novels have been chosen as Alternate Selections for the Doubleday/Literary Guild Book Club. Her first novel with Avon Inspire, Hidden, was an Inspirational Reader’s Choice finalist.

Shelley also writes historical, western inspirational romances for Abingdon Press as Shelley Gray. Her first novel with Abingdon, A Texan’s Promise, was released in October 2011 and has earned glowing reviews.

In addition to her writing as Shelley Shepard Gray, Shelley has written a dozen novels for Harlequin American Romance under the pseudonym Shelley Galloway. Her first novel with Harlequin, Cinderella Christmas, reached number six on the Waldenbooks Bestseller list, and her second book for the American Romance line, Simple Gifts, won Romantic Times Magazine’s Reviewer’s Choice Award for Best Harlequin American Romance of 2006.

Before writing romances, Shelley lived in Texas and Colorado, where she taught school and earned both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in education. She now lives in southern Ohio and writes full time. Shelley is married, the mother of two children in college, and is an active member of her church.

Shelley is a member of RWA’s Published Author chapter, ACFW, and the Faith Hope and Love Chapter of RWA.  To learn more about Shelley and her books, go to  www.shelleyshepardgray.com.