Donna Everhart will visit us to present and sign her historical fiction novel When the Jessamine Grows.

When the Jessamine Grows is set during the Civil War, but it is not a war story. Rather, it is a story about those whose fight for survival took place far from any battlefront, told from the rarely heard perspective of a courageous Southern woman whose refusal to support the Confederacy brands her a traitor and a pariah within her own community. It is a story about the impossibility of neutrality in times of injustice. And finally, set amidst the rugged beauty of rural 19th century North Carolina, When the Jessamine Grows is a story about love and loss, family, and survival, standing by one’s values and finding the grace to believe in a better future.

For readers of Days Without End by Sebastian Barry, Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, and Enemy Women by Paulette Jiles, an evocative, morally complex novel set in rural North Carolina during the Civil War, as one woman fights to keep her family united and neutral during the most devastating and divisive period in American history.

Few writers evoke fortitude in the face of hardship and the complex heritage of the American South as vividly and authentically as Donna Everhart. Her first five novels, including The Education of Dixie Dupree and The Saints of Swallow Hill, firmly established her as a powerful voice in Southern fiction, receiving much acclaim including an Indie Next List selection, a SIBA Okra Pick, a Southeastern Library Association Award, and two Publishers Marketplace Buzz Books selections.

Now, in her sixth and most richly textured novel to date, Everhart turns to a period earlier and more complex than any she’s previously explored.