Out now · Torchflame Books
Lost Souls Recovered
One fateful night, John must leave everything he has ever known. Life was never so kind as to let him go peacefully.
Life on the plantation was all seventeen-year-old John had ever known. His mother had been the property of the plantation owner, and in turn, so was John. Slavery had ended — but also, it had not.
When the wife of a plantation owner dies on a fateful night in 1887, John Billingsly makes the gut-wrenching decision to leave his mother and everything he knows to flee their slave cabin in Richmond, Virginia. Instructed by his mother to find a cousin in Mt. Hope, Alabama, John wends his way south in hope of a better life.
With the plantation owner shadowing him every step of the way, his journey is perilous. One misstep could cost him his freedom — and his life.
Inspired by a true story, Lost Souls Recovered is a mesmerizing historical family saga of loss and gain, survival and self-reinvention, and one family’s fight for freedom in the midst of the post-Civil War American South.
“An expertly told tale of loss, love, and second chances.”
- Publisher
- Torchflame Books
- Published
- October 18, 2022
- Pages
- 380
- ISBN
- 978-1-61153-474-0
- Genre
- Historical fiction
- Setting
- Virginia to Alabama, 1887–1928
From the novel
“Even with the War a little more than two decades in the past, John was a virtual slave, chained to the people who’d once legally owned his mother. At seventeen, and his youth pulling at him to go, to explore, to find a woman, he hankered to break the chain and go elsewhere—anywhere that wasn’t Richmond—but thoughts of leaving his saintly mother kept the chain in place.”
Forthcoming
Belly of the Beast
Twenty-one-year-old Sebastian Hawkins has a Yale degree, a future already drawn, and a story his family never proved: land taken from his great-great-great-grandfather, Pony Hawkins, in Lawrence County, Alabama. A county archivist finds a deed. In 1876, Pony bought an acre. Two years later, a paper calls the transfer a gift. A hundred and fifty years later, Sebastian fights to recover the land — and the name — that fear taught the family to leave buried.
In progress
Beta Reader
Clarkston McClaren is a teacher without a classroom, a father behind on the court order, and a novelist who believes the advance will make everyone whole. A beta reader named Sam tells him to put the book in a small town and make the past feel alive. The manuscript opens. So does Brighton County, Ohio — a town that would rather its history stay buried.