What the Trees Remember: A Novel

What the Trees Remember: A Novel

• Deeply researched and perfect for fans of Jayne Anne Phillips’s Night Watch, this action-packed coming-of-age tale, set in post–Civil War Appalachia, is part suspenseful mystery, part incisive examination of this nation’s history of racial violence.
  
  Dora Minor, a quirky and fiercely courageous girl, grows up in a remote Virginia mountain community in a family of outliers, thanks to their Quaker beliefs that all people are born equal. After her mother’s death, her indomitable, pipe-smoking grandmother Alma—a revolutionary in her own right—becomes her primary caregiver and protector. With a fierce moral compass, Alma helps shape Dora’s worldview and guides her to question the status quo.
  
  When Dora’s father partners with formerly enslaved Ginny Dudley to open a school for Black children in a place where none would otherwise exist, it sparks a violent backlash. After her father’s death and then a lynching, Dora, with Alma at her side, are forced to look at their community in a new light. Alongside Ginny’s husband Randolph and her closest friend Watcher James, a preacher guided by Nature spirits, Dora confronts hard truths about her neighbors, her father’s death, and, finally, the mysteries of her mother’s life—all of which ultimately leads to healing.
  
  A post–Civil War novel that opens just as Reconstruction is falling apart,What the Trees Rememberdepicts a time of extreme social unrest and the birth of the Jim Crow era as experienced by strong women constrained by the limitations of the time they live in. Through the devastating loss of loved ones, the destruction of the comfortable life they’ve known, and Nature’s wrath, Dora and Alma strive to rise above their trials by drawing strength from the natural world and never losing faith in themselves.Abigail Cutter bases her novels on extensive historical research, but she isn’t a professional historian. She started out as an artist/printmaker with an MFA from George Washington University, teaching art and showing work in galleries. During a long stint at the National Endowment for the Humanities, she developed a deep love for American history. She also married a man who came with an 18th-century farm in the mountains of Virginia. Also the author of The Last of What I Am, Cutter currently lives with her family both at the farm and in the small historic town of Waterford, VA.“. . . just magic with characters’ lives so rich I wanted to read on and on. Southern history we have NOT read.”—Lee Smith, New York Times best-selling author of The Last Girls
  
  “Full of wisdom and beauty, this is the kind of deep, challenging, and propulsive story that sticks with you long after you finished reading it. Cutter tackles the thorny issues of a post Civil-War South with intelligence and generosity. The people and the geography come alive in her capable hands. This story speaks directly to our times and will leave you hopeful that we can in fact build a better world through education and empathy.”—Katrin Schumann,Washington Postbest-selling author ofThe Forgotten HoursPraise for The Last of What I Am:
  
  “A riveting read, rich in historic detail and moral complexity.”—Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of March
  
  “A searing, brilliant, moving, and utterly original Civil War novel. . . . A stirring meditation on guilt and redemption.”—Lee Smith, New York Times best-selling author of The Last Girls
• Cutter, Abigail
• ISBN: 9798896363347