The Star of Camp Greene

Sometimes heroism is found in dreams deferred.

Charlotte, NC. 1918. Broadway darling Calla Connolly had it all: a rising career on the stage and a loving fiancé, a fellow stage actor. But after his tragic death early in the war, Calla is touring the American training camps, hoping to convince General Pershing to let her tour the French front to cheer the men and honor her fiancé's memory. But her hopes are dashed when she contracts Spanish flu while performing at Camp Greene.

While convalescing, Calla inadvertently overhears a sensitive Army secret and is ordered to remain at Camp Greene for the duration of the war while her former mentor and rival steals her tour out from under her. Having no choice but to stay at the camp, she becomes the resident performer and forms attachments to several musician soldiers.

When she falls in love with the man responsible for trapping her at camp, the mission she's sworn to keep secret threatens the men she's come to care for. Calla is forced to decide what her dreams are worth--and if the future she never expected might only be possible if she lets those dreams go.


Sing Me Home to Carolina

A small town girl turned big city businesswoman returns home to help her parents, only to find her heart being tugged between her old flame and the town’s mysterious new guy. This witty and effervescent novel is perfect for fans of Schitt’s Creek and Hart of Dixie.

Event planner Hattie Norwood only came back home to Mountain View, South Carolina to support her parents as they receive word that the family peanut farm is infertile. This news doesn’t come as a surprise to Hattie, and she plans to return to Charlotte at the weekend’s end.

But then the town councilwoman begs Hattie to use her event planning prowess to help Mountain View put on a musical benefit to stop the construction of the new Carolina Panthers stadium—a project Hattie is actually in favor of, much to the dismay of the locals—and she finds herself agreeing to stay until the town’s Founder’s Day celebration a week later, just as her old flame, former MLB standout Lee Lockhardt, materializes in town after a career-ending injury.

When the hunky and mysterious new owner of Fox’s Hardware, Fox Ryan, suggests the Founder’s Day celebration be moved to the Norwoods’ barn in an attempt to reinvent the failing farm as a music and event venue, Hattie agrees, unaware this move will thrust the town, her love life, and the brewing tension over the stadium into a very public spotlight.

Fans of small-town romance and quirky casts of characters will be rooting for Team Lee or Team Fox as Hattie decides if love, like most music, is meant to fade or last forever.


What The Mountains Remember

"Joy Callaway weaves a dramatic, heartfelt story of self-discovery and a hard-won love against the stunning backdrop the 'Eighth Wonder of the World.'" --Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times bestselling author of Time is a River

At this wondrous resort, secrets can easily be hidden in plain sight when the eye is trained on beauty.

April 1913--Belle Newbold hasn't seen mountains for seven years--since her father died in a mining accident and her mother married oil and gas magnate, Shipley Newbold. But when her stepfather's business acquaintance, Henry Ford, invites the family on one of his famous Vagabonds camping tours, she is forced to face the hills once again--primarily in order to reunite with her future fiancé, owner of the land the Vagabonds are using for their campsite, a man she's only met once before. It is a veritable arranged marriage, but she prefers it that way. Belle isn't interested in love. She only wants a simple life--a family of her own and the stability of a wealthy man's pockets. That's what Worth Delafield has promised to give her and it's worth facing the mountains again, the reminder of the past, and her poverty, to secure her future.

But when the Vagabonds group is invited to tour the unfinished Grove Park Inn and Belle is unexpectedly thrust into a role researching and writing about the building of the inn--a construction the locals are calling The Eighth Wonder of the World--she quickly realizes that these mountains are no different from the ones she once called home. As Belle peels back the facade of Grove Park Inn, of Worth, of the society she's come to claim as her own, and the truth of her heart, she begins to see that perhaps her part in Grove Park's story isn't a coincidence after all. Perhaps it is only by watching a wonder rise from ordinary hands and mountain stone that she can finally find the strength to piece together the long-destroyed path toward who she was meant to be.


All the Pretty Places

Joy Callaway returns with a captivating story of a strong woman in a striking setting, examining the life-changing effects of the beauty of nature and how that splendor is restricted to the rich and privileged in the Gilded Age.

1893: In the little town of Rye, New York, it seems everyone—like the rest of the country—is in an economic panic. Once acclaimed for its rare and exotic plant species, Rye Nurseries—the largest nursery on the East Coast—is the supplier of choice for the most respected landscape architects, but now businesses in the community seem to close by the handful weekly. The threat to her family’s livelihood keeps twenty-two-year-old Sadie Fremd up at night. Her father seems unconcerned by the crisis and is determined to pass the nursery on to one of his sons—despite Sadie’s ardent study of horticulture. Her dreams are all wrapped up in the nursery, a company on the brink of closing, which would leave hundreds of people out of jobs and Sadie’s dream lost forever.

Sadie encourages her father to seek partnerships with big names of the day—the Rockefellers, Goulds, and Starins, among others—to help their nursery remain stable. As she becomes more involved in the business of natural beauty, she begins to notice something. Outside the gates of mansions owned by the elite, people linger—the mourning, the poor, the struggling. Sadie is forced to reckon with whether only the privileged deserve a right to the beauty she helps inspire. Then a conversation with a man who lost everything changes Sadie’s perspective forever and prompts her to make a choice that has the potential to leave the nursery, her family, and her dreams in ruins.


The Grand Design

She has one last chance to prove she chose the right course for her life.

In 1908, young Dorothy Tuckerman chafes under the bland, beige traditions of her socialite circles. Only the aristocracy’s annual summer trips to The Greenbrier resort in West Virginia spark her imagination. In this naturally beautiful place, an unexpected romance with an Italian racecar driver gives Dorothy a taste of the passion and adventure she wants. But her family intervenes, sentencing Dorothy to the life she hopes to escape.

Thirty-eight years later, as World War II draws to a close, Dorothy has done everything a woman in the early twentieth century should not: she has divorced her husband—scandalous—and established America’s first interior design firm—shocking. Now, Dorothy returns to The Greenbrier with the assignment to restore it to something even greater than its original glory. With her beloved company’s future hanging in the balance and brimming with daring, unconventional ideas, Dorothy has one more chance to give her dreams wings or succumb to her what society tells her is her inescapable fate.

Based on the true story of famed designer Dorothy Draper, The Grand Design is a moving tale of one woman’s quest to transform the walls that hold her captive.


The Fifth Avenue Artists Society

“In her promising debut novel, Joy Callaway spins an engrossing Gilded Age tale of a determined young woman’s pursuit of her art despite dreams thwarted, love betrayed, and shocking family secrets revealed.”

- Jennifer Chiaverini, author of Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker

The Bronx, 1891. Virginia Loftin, the boldest of four artistic sisters in a family living in genteel poverty, knows what she wants most: to become a celebrated novelist despite her gender, and to marry Charlie, the boy next door and her first love.

When Charlie proposes instead to a woman from a wealthy family, Ginny is devastated; shutting out her family, she holes up and turns their story into fiction, obsessively rewriting a better ending. Though she works with newfound intensity, literary success eludes her-until she attends a salon hosted in her brother’s writer friend John Hopper’s Fifth Avenue mansion. Among painters, musicians, actors, and writers, Ginny returns to herself, even blooming under the handsome, enigmatic John’s increasingly romantic attentions.

Just as she and her siblings have become swept up in the society, though, Charlie throws himself back into her path, and Ginny learns that the salon’s bright lights may be obscuring some dark shadows. Torn between two worlds that aren’t quite as she’d imagined them, Ginny will realize how high the stakes are for her family, her writing, and her chance at love.

 

Secret Sisters

“A shining example of the power of persistent women united in their aim to reshape history.”

- Sarah McCoy, New York Times bestselling author of The Baker’s Daughter

From the author of The Fifth Avenue Artists Society comes this unforgettable historical novel based on the founding of the country’s first sororities.

Illinois, 1881: Whitsitt College sophomore Beth Carrington has two goals to fulfill by the time she graduates: obtain a medical degree, and establish a women’s fraternity, Beta Xi Beta, that will help young women like herself to connect with and support one another while attending the male-dominated Whitsitt.

Neither is an easy task. The sole female student in the physicians’ program, Beth is constantly called out by her professors and peers for having the audacity not to concentrate on a more “fitting” subject like secretarial studies. Meanwhile, secret organizations are off-limits, and simply by crowding together in a dank basement room and creating a sense of camaraderie, she and her small group of fraternity sisters risk expulsion.

In order to have the fraternity recognized, she knows she needs help. She turns to the most powerful student on campus: senior Grant Richardson, Iota Gamma fraternity president and the scion of a Whitsitt family—a man she’s only acquainted with because of her longstanding friendship with his fraternity brother Will Buchannan. Staunchly traditional, Grant doesn’t see the purpose of this women’s organization, but captivated by Beth, he agrees to give her a helping hand. What she doesn’t know is how many will stop at nothing to keep her burgeoning organization out of the record books—and who she can actually trust along the way.

As Beth fights for her beloved Beta Xi Beta to be recognized, she will uncover deep secrets about the college and those who surround her, and will have to put both love and friendship on the line so that history can be made.

Buy Secret Sisters at these retailers
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Books-a-Million | Apple | Indiebound

Buy The Fifth Avenue Artists Society at these retailers
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Books-a-Million | iBooks | Indiebound | Park Road Books