Before We Were Yours

Description

By Lisa Wingate

Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live on their family’s shantyboat on the Mississippi. One stormy night their father rushes their mother to hospital, Rill is left in charge, and strangers arrive and take all five children to a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage.

Decades later, Avery Stafford, a federal prosecutor from a powerful South Carolina family, meets an old woman in a nursing home who seems to know her, and starts pulling at a thread her own family would rather she left alone. Based on the real Georgia Tann, who stole and sold children for thirty years.

First published 2017