WVU Press has published Maranatha Road, a novel by Heather Bell Adams. This is her debut book.
Amy Greene, author of Bloodroot, calls Maranatha Road “an ode to beauty and suffering, grief and hope in a small mountain town.”
Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and Chasing the North Star, calls Heather Adams “an exciting new voice in Appalachian fiction.”
Kim Church, author of Byrd, says “in prose as pure and clear and resonant as a mountain ballad, Adams takes us directly into the hearts of her characters.”
In Maranatha Road, after Sadie’s son, Mark, is gone, she doesn’t have much use for other people, including her husband. The last person she wants to see is Tinley Greene, who shows up claiming she’s pregnant with Mark’s baby.
Sadie knows Tinley must be lying because Mark was engaged and never would have betrayed his fiancée. So she refuses to help, and she doesn’t breathe a word about it to anybody. But in a small, southern town like Garnet, nothing stays secret for long.
Once Sadie starts piecing together what happened to Mark, she discovers she was wrong about Tinley. And when her husband is rushed to the hospital, Sadie must hurry to undo her mistake before he runs out of time to meet their grandchild.
Heather Bell Adams is from Hendersonville, North Carolina, and now lives in Raleigh with her husband and son. She is the winner of the 2016 James Still Fiction Prize and her short fiction appears in the Thomas Wolfe Review, Clapboard House, Pembroke Magazine, Broad River Review, and elsewhere. This is her first novel and is the winner of the Knoxville Writers’ Guild Contest. Learn more at heatherbelladams.com.
Book tour schedule in North Carolina:
September 10, 3 p.m.
Scuppernong Books Greensboro
September 12, 6 p.m., with Jeremy Jones
Malaprop’s Bookstore Asheville
September 14, 7 p.m.
Quail Ridge Books Raleigh
September 29, 6 p.m.
Cocoon Gallery Apex
October 7, 2 p.m.
Page 158 Books Wake Forest
November 12, 2 p.m.
Park Road Books Charlotte
Publication date: September 2017
300pp / PB 978-1-943665-75-4: $18.99 / ebook 978-1-943665-76-1: $18.99 /Reading and discussion questions
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For more information visit West Virginia University Press website.