Author Event: Donna Everhart
Page 158 Books is delighted to welcome bestselling and local favorite author Donna Everhart in celebration of her new book SAINTS OF SWALLOW HILL. This will be an in-person event and will follow current public health guidance.
Few writers evoke the complexities of the heart and the gritty fascination of the American South as vividly and authentically as Donna Everhart. Now Where the Crawdads Sing meets The Four Winds as the award-winning author immerses readers in a unique setting – a turpentine camp buried deep in the vast pine forests of Georgia during the Great Depression—for a captivating story of friendship, survival, and three vagabonds' intersecting lives…
During the Great Depression, destitute workers live and toil under terrible conditions in remote labor camps isolated throughout the expansive pine forests of the American South. As they harvest the pine gum that will be refined into turpentine, they are entirely dependent on greedy camp owners who provide food and housing at grossly inflated prices, creating an endless cycle of labor and debt. But for the most desperate among America’s vast unemployed, these camps are often the last and only option.
This much is true for three individuals whose lives intersect in the deep woods of Georgia at the Swallow Hill turpentine camp in 1932. For Rae Lynn Cobb, a young woman disguised as a man, Swallow Hill offers distance and anonymity from those who would wrongly imprison her for killing her kind though careless husband. For a charming bachelor named Del Reese, it’s a place where backbreaking work might drown out memories of a recent trauma that’s shaken him to his core.
But Swallow Hill is no easy haven. The squalid camp is ruled by a sadistic boss named Crow and the greedy commissary owner Otis Riddle, a man who takes out his frustrations on his wife, Cornelia. Del and “Ray Cobb” struggle to survive harsh, brutal conditions under the ever-watchful, narrow-minded Crow. As Rae Lynn forges a deeper friendship with both Del and Cornelia, she begins to envision a path out of the camp. But she will have to come to terms with her past, with all its pain and beauty, before she can open herself to a new life and seize the chance to begin again…
Donna Everhart is the USA Today bestselling author of Southern fiction, including the Indie Next List selection The Education of Dixie Dupree, The Forgiving Kind, The Moonshiner's Daughter, and the Southeastern Library Association Award-winning novel The Road to Bittersweet. Born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, she now lives just an hour away along with her husband and a tiny, heart-stealing Yorkshire terrier named Mister.
Date and Time
Saturday Feb 12, 2022
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EST
Location
415 S Brooks St
Fees/Admission
free