Ann Gabhart, the bestselling, award-winning author of over thirty novels, returns to Novelists Unwind to talk about her latest novel, An Appalachian Summer.

The story opens in May 1933 and centers around a debutante, Piper Danson, whose friends have lost their social standing when their family fortunes were wiped out because of the stock market crash. Rather than marry the man chosen by her father, Piper decides to spend the summer as a volunteer courier with the Frontier Nursing Service.

Ann shares the history of the Frontier Nursing Service and its remarkable founder, Mary Breckinridge, whose headquarters in Wendover, Kentucky is now a bed-and-breakfast. Mary first recruited midwives from England to come to the area to provide better healthcare and then opened midwifery schools to train nurses here in the U.S.

We also talk about Ann’s love of Kentucky–she lives on a farm only about a mile from where she was born–and her next story, about Packhorse Librarians, which also takes place in the early 1930s. Sounds like a great story to me!

Connect with Ann on her website and.on Facebook.

Purchase Links: An Appalachian Summer and River to Redemption

An Appalachian Summer

In 1933 Louisville, Kentucky, even the ongoing economic depression cannot keep Piper Danson’s parents from insisting on a debut party. After all, their fortune came through the market crash intact, and they’ve picked out the perfect suitor for their daughter. Braxton Crandall can give her the kind of life she’s used to. The only problem? This is not the man–or the life–she really wants.

When Piper gets the opportunity to volunteer as a horseback Frontier Nursing courier in the Appalachian Mountains for the summer, she jumps at the chance to be something other than a dutiful daughter or a kept wife in a loveless marriage. The work is taxing, the scenery jaw-droppingly gorgeous, and the people she meets along the way open up a whole new world to her. The longer she stays, the more an advantageous marriage slips from her grasp. But something much more precious–true love–is drawing ever closer.

River to Redemption

Orphaned in the cholera epidemic of 1833, Adria Starr was cared for by a slave named Louis, a man who stayed in Springfield, Kentucky, when anyone with means had fled. A man who passed up the opportunity to escape his bondage and instead tended to the sick and buried the dead. A man who, twelve years later, is being sold by his owners despite his heroic actions. Now nineteen, Adria has never forgotten what Louis did for her. She’s determined to find a way to buy Louis’s freedom. But in 1840s Kentucky, she’ll face an uphill battle.

Based partly on a true story, Ann H. Gabhart’s latest historical novel is a tour de force. The vividly rendered town of Springfield and its citizens immerse readers in a story of courage, betrayal, and honor that will stick with them long after they turn the last page.