A Long Time Gone
by Karen White

“We Walker women were born screaming into this world, the beginning of a lifelong quest to find what would quiet us. But whatever drove us away was never stronger than the pull of what brought us back....”

When Vivien Walker left her home in the Mississippi Delta, she swore never to go back, as generations of the women in her family had. But in the spring, nine years to the day since she’d left, that’s exactly what happens—Vivien returns, fleeing from a broken marriage and her lost dreams for children.

What she hopes to find is solace with “Bootsie,” her dear grandmother who raised her, a Walker woman with a knack for making everything all right. But instead she finds that her grandmother has died and that her estranged mother is drifting further away from her memories. Now Vivien is forced into the unexpected role of caretaker, challenging her personal quest to find the girl she herself once was.

But for Vivien things change in ways she cannot imagine when a violent storm reveals the remains of a long-dead woman buried near the Walker home, not far from the cypress swamp that is soon to give up its ghosts. Vivien knows there is now only one way to rediscover herself—by uncovering the secrets of her family and breaking the cycle of loss that has haunted them for generations.

Other Books by Karen White

Karen White

The Forgotten Room

The Sound of Glass

A Long Time Gone

Return to Tradd Street
Tradd Street #4

The Time Between

Sea Change

The Strangers on Montagu Street
Tradd Street

The Beach Trees

On Folly Beach

The Girl on Legare Street

The Lost Hours

The House on Tradd Street

The Memory of Water

Learning to Breathe

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Karen White's Bio

After playing hooky one day in the seventh grade to read Gone With the Wind, Karen White knew she wanted to be a writer—or become Scarlett O'Hara.  In spite of these aspirations, Karen pursued a degree in business and graduated cum laude with a BS in Management from Tulane University.  Ten years later, after leaving the business world, she fulfilled her dream of becoming a writer and wrote her first book.  In the Shadow of the Moon was published in August, 2000.  This book was nominated for the prestigious RITA award in 2001 in two separate categories.  Her books have since been nominated for numerous national contests including three more RITAs, has twice been a finalist for the SIBA (Southeastern Booksellers Alliance) Fiction Book of the Year, and has twice won the National Readers’ Choice Award for Learning to Breathe and On Folly Beach.

Karen currently writes what she refers to as ‘grit lit’—southern women’s fiction—and has also expanded her horizons into writing a bestselling mystery series set in Charleston, South Carolina.  Her sixteenth novel and first hardcover, The Time Between, was published in June 2013 by New American Library, a division of Penguin Publishing Group, and debuted on the New York Times bestseller list at number 25.

Karen hails from a long line of Southerners but spent most of her growing up years in London, England and is a graduate of the American School in London.  She currently lives near Atlanta, Georgia with her husband and two children, and a spoiled Havanese dog (who appears in several of her books), Quincy.  When not writing, she spends her time reading, scrapbooking, playing piano, and avoiding cooking. 

Her seventeenth novel—the fourth book in the Tradd Street series—Return to Tradd Street, was published in January 2014.  June 2014 will see the release of her second hardcover, A Long Time Gone, set in the Mississippi Delta, and in July Peguin will  publish the anthology Grand Central, a collaboration with nine other authors.

Karen loves hearing from readers. Please email her at [email protected] or write to Karen White, PO Box 623, Roswell, Georgia 30077.

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