Lisa Wingate · 2017 · river

Lisa Wingate's 2017 novel, based on a real scandal. In 1939 Memphis, twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her siblings are seized from their family's Mississippi River shantyboat and thrown into a Tennessee Children's Home orphanage, to be sold to wealthy families across the country. Decades later in South Carolina, the privileged Avery Stafford follows a chance clue on a journey into her family's hidden past, from Aiken to the coast at Edisto Island.

1. 1
   Memphis

   Where twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her siblings live aboard the family's Mississippi River shantyboat, until strangers seize the children the night their father rushes their mother to hospital.

2. 2
   The orphanage

   The Tennessee Children's Home Society, run by the real-life Georgia Tann, where the Foss children are held, mistreated and sold off one by one to families who ask no questions.

3. 3
   Aiken

   Present-day South Carolina, where the federal prosecutor Avery Stafford, home to help her ailing father, is unsettled by a chance encounter that sends her digging into her grandmother's buried history.

4. 4
   Edisto Island

   The South Carolina coast where the threads of past and present finally meet, and the truth of the stolen children and the family's long-kept secret comes to light.