Award Winning Author KIMBERLY BROCK Celebrates Her New Book THE FABLE EARTH

Kimberly Brock is the bestselling author of The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare and her award-winning debut, The River Witch.

The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare spent three weeks on The Southern Independent Booksellers Bestseller List and was shortlisted for the Townsend Prize for Fiction.

Her debut was an Amazon bestseller featured by both national and international book clubs and included in multiple reading lists. Praised by RT Reviews and Huffington Post as a “solemn journey of redemption, enlightenment and love,” and evocative of “the stories of Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers,” Kimberly’s debut novel was honored with the Georgia Author of the Year Award in 2013, by the Georgia Writer’s 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.

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.

‘Brock (The River Witch) delivers an evocative Southern yarn of long-held secrets. In summer 1932, Georgia’s Cumberland Island comes to life in 1932 with an annual party at the grand mansion owned by the philanthropist Carnegie family. Joanna Burton, a socialite from Asheville, N.C., is in town to attend the party with her fiancé, wealthy islander Ellis Piedmont, and her beauty and selfish airs fuel the jealousy and anger of local artist Cleo Woodbine, who’s in love with Ellis. By the end of the night, two boys have accidentally drowned, including Ellis. In chapters set in 1959 from Cleo’s point of view, shortly after Joanna has died from a stroke, Brock gradually reveals how the women’s rivalry contributed to the fatal accident. A parallel narrative follows Joanna’s daughter, Frances Flood, who returns to the island to learn more about her late mother’s life and retrieve her heirloom pearls. Brock’s insightful writing brings her characters to life, highlighting Cleo’s regret and Frances’s curiosity, and the pitch-perfect plotting will move readers quickly through the tale. It’s an adroit work of Southern fiction.’

PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY

“In her third novel, Brock proves marvelously adept at intertwining mythic stories and contemporary reality and showing how people reconcile the two…While tackling issues of race and class prejudice, Brock’s lush, multilayered writing begs to be read slowly as she gently unfolds the mysteries of this picturesque yet haunted Southern landscape, where once-elegant Carnegie mansions still stand. An ideal choice for admirers of Delia Owens, Sarah Loudin Thomas, and Sarah Addison Allen.”

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