Book Signing: Diane C. McPhail with Follow the Stars Home
October 1 @ 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Over the moon excited to have Diane C. McPhail join us for a special signing of her gorgeous new release, Follow the Stars Home, (PLUS we’ll have copies of her other works, including The Abolitionist’s Daughter and The Seamstress of New Orleans available for purchase and signing!
Follow the Stars Home is captivating historical fiction, with a gorgeous cover to boot. This acclaimed author brings to life Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt’s defiant journey of 1811 in this evocative biographical novel for fans of Paula McLain, Gill Paul, Allison Pataki.
It’s a journey that most would call impossible. Yet on October 20th, 1811, Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt–daughter of one of the architects of the United States Capitol–fearlessly boards the steamship New Orleans in Pittsburgh. Eight months pregnant and with a toddler in tow, Lydia is fiercely independent. Against her father’s wishes, she’s already married his much older business colleague, inventor Nicholas Roosevelt–builder of the New Orleans. But the stakes for this trip are much higher.
If Nicholas’s untried steamboat reaches New Orleans, it will serve as a profitable packet ship between that city and Natchez, proving the power of steam as it travels up and down the Mississippi. Success in this venture would revolutionize travel and trade, open the west to expansion, and secure the Roosevelts’ future.
Capable and adventurous, Lydia believes herself ready for all the dangers ahead–growing unrest among native people, disease, and the turbulent Falls of the Ohio, a sixty-foot drop long believed impassable in such a large boat.
Just imagine being a woman of that era, pregnant, enduring violent earthquakes and treacherous waters on the first steamboat voyage to conquer the Mississippi River and redefine America. To our delight, and enlightenment, the author has.
Diane C. McPhail is an artist, minister, and acclaimed author of Follow the Stars Home, The Abolitionist’s Daughter, and The Seamstress of New Orleans, which was a finalist for the Thomas Wolf Fiction Award and the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award. A graduate of Ole Miss, Duke Writers, University of Iowa Distance, and the Yale Writers’ Conference, she is a member of NC Writers Network and the Historical Novel Society. She was born in Jackson, MS, raised on the Mississippi Delta only miles from the river, and now lives in Highlands, North Carolina with her husband and dog