Nancy's Novels
BOOKS
The Women of Abbey Plantation
My new book is finally out and on Amazon.com as of this week, and in bookstores along the South Carolina beaches. I hope to have it in Charlotte bookstores, soon, but it hasn’t happened yet.
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If you are familiar with my first book: SARAH’S SECRET, you will feel right at home with this new one, that I refer to as a parallel sequel (although that is an impossibility if you think about it). In literature, however, absolutely anything is possible.
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THE WOMEN OF ABBEY PLANTATION is a 150-year saga of women and girls who lived at Abbey Plantation in present-day Pawleys Island, SC. The women are of different races, ages, and life perspectives-a plantation mistress, an enslaved housekeeper, the plantation's seer and teacher, a young mixed-race freed-woman, and a teenager from the 1950s. Some of the women know each other; others don't. It's not until the last few pages of the book that the reader learns that the women are unexplainably connected to each other by a small red chair.
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The book is 300-pages-long and has 102,000 words, that means that the stories within the book have had time to develop. I hate books that rush to the end and leave you feeling that the storyline was lacking.
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I hope you finish this book, close the cover and feel that you would recognize the characters in this book if you met them at the grocery store. You could have dinner with them or share a hymnal with them at church, and know that you were sitting next to a friend.
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I have always been complimented for writing dialogue—especially the intimate stuff that women and girls save for their friends. It’s simple, I always say, I’ve written about some of the characters for more than 20 years. They are real to me and I know them. I hope you grow to feel the same way. My sons don’t get it, but who cares. It’s a girl thing; it’s about sisterhood.
Sarah's Secret
Introducing my beautiful new novel: SARAH’S SECRET, a coming-of-age of a fourteen-year-old girl named Sarah, who will go on to become the real-life mistress of True Blue Plantation in present-day Pawleys Island, until her death in 1823.
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The novel is fiction, but it is based on my research and many years of living on the grounds of the former plantation. In 2004 I founded a non-profit to restore the Pawley Family Cemetery at True Blue. Today it is still quietly and meticulously cared for.
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Sarah Vaux was a remarkable woman who was at constant loggerheads with the conventions of the day. As a member of the aristocratic planter class, Sarah’s life was defined for her before she was born. But in subtle ways, she resisted; Sarah was a feminist before the invention of the word. You will be proud of Sarah and if you are anything like me, you will grow to love her.
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The portrait on the book cover was reproduced from an oil on canvas painting of my granddaughter, Lily Hughes. Two summers ago Lily accompanied me to Latta Plantation where I volunteered as a docent. It wasn’t long before she was disenchanted with the plantation and wanted to go home.
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I insisted on taking one photograph of her before we left. She was not happy, but I took it anyway. And I think that’s the magic of the portrait. Lily is not posing. The stare is real.
