By: Shelley Burchfield
ISBN: 979-8218292713
BeanPress, 2023
2025 Sarton Finalist: Historical Fiction
In the autumn of 1928, herbalist and healer Callie Beecham owns a shop in tiny Pickens, South Carolina. She makes her living treating patients with plant-based medicines and therapies. When a young man urgently knocks on her door one morning, Callie finds her world turned upside down. He begs Callie to come to the freed-slave settlement of Liberia, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to save his wife, struggling in childbirth. On the back of a mule, Callie follows the man to Liberia and discovers a world previously unknown to her. Callie’s decision to help the residents of Liberia quickly angers the wrong people in town—important people who know a secret about her, These people threaten Callie’s livelihood, her relationships and even her life. Their goal? To remove Callie Beecham and her kind once and for all.
About the Author
Southern author and former teacher, Shelley Burchfield enjoys writing “what-if” historical fiction that flips notorious events upside down. Shelley lives in beautiful north Georgia with her husband and a menagerie of animals. She pulls inspiration for her novels from the majestic Blue Ridge Mountains beyond her windows and Southern tales told by friends and neighbors.
A Southerner by birth, Burchfield’s love of history is evident in her award-winning debut historical fiction novel, THE EARTH REMAINS, published in 2021. Her second novel in the series, CLIMBING TO THE SUN, was published in 2023.
The final book in the series, THERE IS A RIVER, was published in October 2025 and quickly received FIVE STAR reviews by Readers’ Favorite.
To learn more about Shelley Burchfield and her work, please see www.shelleyburchfield.com
