Reader Meet Writer: Diane Chamberlain’s The Last House on the Street

Our first Reader Meet Writer event of 2022. Register to attend HERE! Diane Chamberlain was 14 in the summer of 1964, when she learned about three young civil rights workers who were murdered in Mississippi, at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, while volunteering to work on voter registration, education, and civil rights. It was an event that had a profound impact on Chamberlain, and led to her interest in the 1965 SCOPE project, in which white college students, primarily from the North, traveled to the South to help register Black voters. That project is what inspired and informed her unmissable and timely new book, THE LAST HOUSE ON THE STREET, in which the fight for voting rights provides the backdrop for the story of one young woman’s passion to do what she knows in her heart is right.

1965: Growing up in the well-to-do town of Round Hill, North Carolina, Ellie Hockley was raised to be a certain type of proper Southern lady. Enrolled in college and all but engaged to a bank manager, Ellie isn’t as committed to her expected future as her family believes. She’s chosen to spend her summer break as a volunteer helping to register Black voters. But as Ellie follows her ideals fighting for the civil rights of the marginalized, her scandalized parents scorn her efforts, and her neighbors reveal their prejudices. And when she finds herself falling for a fellow volunteer, Ellie discovers the frightening true nature of the people living in Round Hill.

2010: Architect Kayla Carter and her husband designed a beautiful house for themselves in Round Hill’s new development, Shadow Ridge Estates. It was supposed to be a home where they could raise their three-year-old daughter and grow old together. Instead, it’s the place where Kayla’s husband died in a tragic accident, and vandals leave threatening notes. And Kayla’s neighbor Ellie Hockley is harboring secrets about the dark history of the land where her house was built.

This is the sixth book by Diane Chamberlain that I’ve had the pleasure to work on, and I can honestly say that it is by far the best. Early readers seem to agree. As I write this letter, the book has a 4.5 star average on Goodreads, with over 375 ratings, and over 275 reviews. I urge you to read it and review it this January.