Author Talk & Book Signing with Kimberly Brock

Inspired by the little-known history of Cumberland Island, The Fabled Earth is a sweeping story of family lore and the power of finding your own voice as Southern mythology and personal reckoning collide with a changing world.

1932. Cumberland Island off the coast of Southern Georgia is a strange place to encounter the opulence of the Gilded Age, but the last vestiges of the famed philanthropic Carnegie family still take up brief seasonal residence in their grand mansions there. This year’s party at Plum Orchard is a lively group: young men from some of America’s finest families come to experience the area’s hunting beside a local guide; a beautiful debutante expecting to be engaged by the week’s end, and a promising female artist who believes she has meaningful ties to her wealthy hosts. But when temptations arise and passions flare, an evening of revelry and storytelling goes horribly awry. Lives are both lost and ruined.

1959. Reclusive painter Cleo Woodbine has lived alone for decades on Kingdom Come, a tiny strip of land once occupied by the servants for the great houses on nearby Cumberland. When she is visited by the man who saved her life nearly thirty years earlier, a tempest is unleashed as the stories of the past gather and begin to regain their strength. Frances Flood is a folklorist come to Cumberland Island seeking the source of a legend – and also information about her mother, who was among the guests at a long-ago hunting party. Audrey Howell, briefly a newlywed and now newly widowed, is running a local inn. When she develops an eerie double exposure photograph, some believe she’s raised a ghost–someone who hasn’t been seen since that fateful night in 1932.

As a once-in-a-century storm threatens the natural landscape and shifting tides reveal what Cumberland Island has hidden all along, two timelines and the perspectives of three women intersect to illuminate the life-changing power of finding truth in a folktale.

Books will be available for purchase and signing from The Book Bird of Avondale Estates.

Kimberly Brock is the bestselling author of The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare and her award-winning debut, The River Witch, which was honored with the Georgia Author of the Year Award in 2013, by the Georgia Writers Association.

A former actor and special needs educator, Kimberly received her bachelor’s degree from the University of West Georgia in 1996. In 2014, Kimberly founded Tinderbox Writer’s Workshop, a transformative creative experience for women in the arts. Kimberly has served as a guest lecturer for many regional and national groups, including The Women’s Fiction Writer’s annual conference and The Pat Conroy Literary Center. A native of North Georgia, she now lives near Atlanta, Georgia.

The moderator will be Rosalyn Metz, the Chief Technology Officer for Libraries and Museum at Emory University in Atlanta, where she leads technology initiatives and contributes to open-source projects to support libraries. She lives with her sassy nine-year-old daughter, Genevieve, her nerdy husband, Eston, and her cheese-loving dog, Noly.

Host or Publisher Gwinnett County Public Library