The New South

The Civil War tore her family apart. In a new South, will she put it back together again?

  It’s 1881. Atlanta has risen from the ashes of the war to become the most prosperous and progressive place in the South. Eliza Coldbrook, recent graduate of all-Black Atlanta University, has a future that her mother, once a slave, could never have imagined for her. Will she teach? Will she go to Africa as a missionary? Or will she marry her childhood sweetheart? She has the luxury of a choice.

She hasn’t seen her white half-brother, Matt Kaltenbach, since he and his mother fled the violence of rural Georgia thirteen years ago. Now he’s returned, and he has unfinished business with the past they share. But she wants to bury it. She won’t even see him.

Then they’re thrown together—by labor unrest.

The Black washerwomen of Atlanta live in a city reborn after the Civil War. But they don’t share in the bounty that is the New South. They’re underpaid, overworked, and badly treated by their white employers. Until they decide to go on a strike that brings Atlanta to its knees…

 When Eliza and Matt are swept into the strike, will they heal the wounds of their past—and forgive each other?