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KELLY MUSTAIN is the USA Today bestselling author of The Girls in the Stilt House. She is the recipient of the Mississippi Library Association’s 2023 Author Award for Fiction, and The Girls in the Stilt House was shortlisted for the 2022 Crook’s Corner Book Prize for best debut novel set in the American South. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and commercial magazines. Originally from Mississippi, she currently lives in North Carolina.

From the acclaimed author of The Girls in the Stilt House comes a long-awaited novel both atmospheric and lyrical, a haunting Southern story about memory, family secrets, and fierce and fragile love…

For nearly thirty years, Nell has kept a childhood promise to never reveal what she and Evie found tucked inside a copy of Jane Eyre in their mother’s bookcase—a record of Evie’s birth listing a stranger as her mother. But lately, Nell has been haunted by hazy memories of their early life in Mississippi, years their reclusive mother, Hazel, has kept shrouded in secrecy.

In dual storylines decades apart, Nell, forty-two in 1971, reaches into the past to uncover dangerous, long-buried secrets, and Becca, a young mother in the early 1930s, presses ahead, each moving toward 1934, the catastrophic year that would forever link them.

From a windswept ghost town long forgotten to a river house in notorious Natchez Under-the-Hill to a moody nightclub stage, Evie’s other mother emerges from the shadows of Depression-era Mississippi…