The Daughter of Union County

A mother’s devotion. A daughter’s search for identity. This is a heartbreaking and hopeful novel of love, class, and race set against the backdrop of the post–Civil War South.

In the late nineteenth-century South, Margaret Hardin has been raised with the advantages befitting her titled parents in the finest house in Arkansas. Unknown to the light-skinned, blue-eyed girl, she’s been born into a secret. Though her father—a man desperate to produce an heir—is white, Margaret’s real mother, a woman named Salome, is black. As the years go by, Margaret’s hidden history allows her to pass into a world of privilege. When the truth of her ancestry is revealed, she is confronted by a father who’ll risk anything to protect his legacy and embraced by Salome, who is determined to reclaim the child she loves. It’s a pivotal point for Margaret—as well as for the generations that will follow.

Spanning decades, this unforgettable saga illuminates the empowering struggle of race and reinvention, of loyalty and family, and of finding your identity and the true freedom that comes with it.

Francine Thomas Howard is the author of Page from a Tennessee Journal and Paris Noire. Exploring the multicultural legacy of African-descended people throughout the diaspora, her stories reflect her own African, European, and Native American heritage. Originally from Illinois, Howard earned a BA in occupational therapy from San José State and an MPA from the University of San Francisco. She left a rewarding career in pediatric occupational therapy to pursue another love, writing. Desiring to preserve the remarkable oral histories of her family tree, she began writing down those stories with little thought to publication. That all changed when she turned a family secret about her grandmother and grandfathers into Page from a Tennessee Journal. Howard submitted the novel to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. Weeks after the contest ended, Howard was contacted by Amazon Publishing. She resides with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area.