North Carolina Historical Fiction

Please join us for a conversation between local favorite Joy Callaway and Kim Brock! This author event is free to attend!

Joy Callaway is the international bestselling author of What the Mountains Remember, All the Pretty Places, The Grand Design, Secret Sisters, and The Fifth Avenue Artists Society. She lives in Charlotte, NC, with her family. Visit her online at joycallaway.com; Instagram: @joywcal; and Facebook: @JoyCallawayAuthor.

Kimberly Brock is the award-winning author of The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare and The River Witch. She is the founder of Tinderbox Writers Workshop and has served as a guest lecturer for many regional and national writing workshops including at the Pat Conroy Literary Center. She lives near Atlanta with her husband and three children. Visit her online at kimberlybrockbooks.com; Instagram: @kimberlydbrock; Facebook: @kimberlybrockauthor; Twitter: @kimberlydbrock.

Kim Brock will be speaking about her new book The Fabled Earth, historical fiction that takes place in 1932 on Cumberland Island off the coast of Southern Georgia. Where the last vestiges of the famed philanthropic Carnegie family still take up brief seasonal residence in their grand mansions there. This year's party at Plum Orchard is a lively group: young men from some of America's finest families who come to experience the area's hunting beside a local guide, a beautiful debutante expecting to be engaged by the week's end, and a promising female artist who believes she has meaningful ties to her wealthy hosts. But when temptations arise and passions flare, an evening of revelry and storytelling goes horribly awry. Lives are both lost and ruined.

1959. Reclusive painter Cleo Woodbine has lived alone for decades on Kingdom Come, a tiny strip of land once occupied by the servants for the great houses on nearby Cumberland. When she is visited by the man who saved her life nearly thirty years earlier, a tempest is unleashed as the stories of the past gather and begin to regain their strength. Frances Flood is a folklorist come to Cumberland Island seeking the source of a legend--and also information about her mother, who was among the guests at a long-ago hunting party. Audrey Howell, briefly a newlywed and now newly widowed, is running a local inn. When she develops an eerie double exposure photograph, some believe she's raised a ghost--someone who hasn't been seen since that fateful night in 1932.

Southern mythology and personal reckoning collide in this sweeping story inspired by the little-known history of Cumberland Island when a once-in-a-century storm threatens the natural landscape. Faced with a changing world, two timelines and the perspectives of three women intersect where a folktale meets the truth to reveal what Cumberland Island has hidden all along.

Joy will chat about her latest novel What The Mountains Remember, historical fiction that takes place in April 1913. Belle Newbold hasn't seen mountains for seven years--since her father died in a mining accident and her mother married gasoline magnate, Shipley Newbold. But when her stepfather's business acquaintance, Henry Ford, invites the family on one of his famous Vagabonds camping tours, she is forced to face the hills once again--primarily in order to reunite with her future fiancé, owner of the land the Vagabonds are using for their campsite, a man she's only met once before. It is a veritable arranged marriage, but she prefers it that way. Belle isn't interested in love. She only wants a simple life--a family of her own and the stability of a wealthy man's pockets. That's what Worth Delafield has promised to give her and it's worth facing the mountains again, the reminder of the past, and her poverty, to secure her future.

But when the Vagabonds group is invited to tour the unfinished Grove Park Inn and Belle is unexpectedly thrust into a role researching and writing about the building of the inn--a construction the locals are calling The Eighth Wonder of the World--she quickly realizes that these mountains are no different from the ones she once called home. As Belle peels back the facade of Grove Park Inn, of Worth, of the society she's come to claim as her own, and the truth of her heart, she begins to see that perhaps her part in Grove Park's story isn't a coincidence after all. Perhaps it is only by watching a wonder rise from ordinary hands and mountain stone that she can finally find the strength to piece together the long-destroyed path toward who she was meant to be.

International bestselling author Joy Callaway returns with a story of the ordinary people behind extraordinary beauty--and the question of who gets to tell their stories.