I had a fun time with a good friend at a book event at the Atlanta History Center earlier in the week. Fellow authors and friends Mary Kay Andrews, Kristin Harmel, and Kristi Woodson Harvey helped celebrate Patti Callahan Henry‘s newest book, The Story She Left Behind, with a Friends and Fiction Live! And I snagged a signed copy! If you have never attended any type of book event, you really need to search one out. Great, great fun.
Here’s the first line of Henry’s book:
It is two o’clock in the morning when she leaves everyone she loves.
In 1927, eight-year-old Clara Harrington’s magical childhood shatters when her mother, renowned author, Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, disappears off the coast of South Carolina. Bronwyn stunned the world with a book written in an invented language that became a national sensation when she was just twelve years old. Her departure leaves behind not only a devoted husband and heartbroken daughter, but also the hope of ever translating the sequel to her landmark work. As the headlines focus on the missing author, Clara yearns for something far deeper and more insatiable: her beautiful mother.
By 1952, Clara is an illustrator raising her own daughter, Wynnie. When a stranger named Charlie Jameson contacts her from London claiming to have discovered a handwritten dictionary of her mother’s lost language. Clara is skeptical. Compelled by the tragedy of her mother’s vanishing, she crosses the Atlantic with Wynnie only to arrive during one of London’s most deadly natural disasters—the Great Smog. With asthmatic Wynnie in peril, they escape the city with Charlie and find refuge in the Jameson’s family retreat nestled in the Lake District. It is there that Clara must find the courage to uncover the truth about her mother and the story she left behind.
Told in Patti Callahan Henry’s lyrical, enchanting prose, The Story She Left Behind is a captivating novel of mystery and family legacy that captures the profound longing for a mother and the evergreen allure of secrets.
Patti Callahan Henry is a New York Times and USA Today best-selling novelist of fifteen novels, including the historical fiction (writing as Patti Callahan) BECOMING MRS. LEWIS—The Improbable Love Story of Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis. In addition, she is the recipient of The Christy Award—A 2019 Winner “Book of the Year.”, The Harper Lee Distinguished Writer of the Year for 2020, the Alabama Library Association Book of the Year for 2019, and the RNA UK finalist for Romantic Historical Fiction.
She is also the co-founder of the Facebook weekly show Friends and Fiction.
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