Bluebottle
Bellamy Beach didn't finish raising Shannon so much as wear her down.
Five years ago, Shannon’s father packed her up in the dead of night and fled to the coast, leaving her mother behind without explanation. Now Shannon tends to her dying great-grandfather by day and watches her father gamble away his wages by night in a glittering tourist town. The only proof her mother ever existed is a box of hand-painted playing cards hidden beneath her bed—and one rule she’s never dared break: don’t go looking.
When Shannon meets Mary, a restless neighbor with a half-repaired truck and no plans to stay, she glimpses a life that belongs to her. They flee into a Georgia storm, but the cards follow. So does the past they were painted to hide: a stolen child, a creek in Tifton, a sister who ran, and one who would kill to keep her.
About Bluebottle
Bellamy Beach didn't finish raising Shannon so much as wear her down.
Five years ago, Shannon’s father packed her up in the dead of night and fled to the coast, leaving her mother behind without explanation. Now Shannon tends to her dying great-grandfather by day and watches her father gamble away his wages by night in a glittering tourist town. The only proof her mother ever existed is a box of hand-painted playing cards hidden beneath her bed—and one rule she’s never dared break: don’t go looking.
When Shannon meets Mary, a restless neighbor with a half-repaired truck and no plans to stay, she glimpses a life that belongs to her. They flee into a Georgia storm, but the cards follow. So does the past they were painted to hide: a stolen child, a creek in Tifton, a sister who ran, and one who would kill to keep her.
India Herning
India (Indie) Herning, born 2008, is a debut voice in literary fiction. She resides in the American southeast, close to her family. Writing from the intersection of the traditional Southern Gothic and the lived experience of a new generation, Herning is preoccupied with the things left unsaid. Her novel dissects female devotion across the decades. When she isn’t writing, she’s painting, at the dance studio, and exploring the red-dirt back roads and creek beds of her home.
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