Événement

Blue Bicycle Books Charleston Author Series with Susan Rivers

Join us Friday June 29 for Blue Bicycle Books Author Series luncheon at Halls Signature Events with Susan Rivers, and her book is "The Second Mrs. Hockaday."

About the Book:
When Major Gryffth Hockaday is called to the front lines of the Civil War, his new bride is left to care for her husband's three-hundred-acre farm and infant son. Placidia, a mere teenager herself living far from her family and completely unprepared to run a farm or raise a child, must endure the darkest days of the war on her own. By the time Major Hockaday returns two years later, Placidia is bound for jail, accused of having borne a child in his absence and murdering it. What really transpired in the two years he was away?

A love story, a story of racial divide, and a story of the South as it fell in the war, The Second Mrs. Hockaday reveals how this generation and the next began to see their world anew.

Told in haunting and moving prose through journal entries and correspondence, this story based on actual events tells of a newly married young woman left home alone with just the servants and her husband's infant son after her officer husband is called back to fight for the Confederacy. Returning home years later, he finds his wife has been accused of a horrible crime of which she will not speak. It's at once a love story, a history lesson and a beautifully written tale of forgiveness. (Reviewed by BookBrowse First Impression Reviewers).

About the Author:
Rivers began her writing career as a playwright, receiving the Julie Harris Playwriting Award and the New York Drama League Award, working as an NEA Writer-in-Residence in San Francisco, and being named as a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award for British and American Women Playwrights.

The Second Mrs. Hockaday, published by Algonquin Books, is her debut novel. It was a People Magazine "Best New Books Pick" and a Woman's Day "Editor's Desk Pick" in 2017, as well as IndieNext, Library Reads and Winter OKRA Picks. The novel was a finalist for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize in 2017 and is one of four finalists in Southern Fiction for the Southern Book Prize 2018.

Rivers lives with her husband in a former cotton-mill town in upstate South Carolina.