By: Kelly Mustian
ISBN: 9781464230370
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Publication Date: 04/01/2025
Format: PapeRback
My Rating: TBR
From the acclaimed author of The Girls in the Stilt House comes a long-awaited novel both atmospheric and lyrical, a haunting Southern story about memory, family secrets, and fierce and fragile love.
For nearly thirty years, Nell has kept a childhood promise to never reveal what she and Evie found tucked inside a copy of Jane Eyre in their mother's bookcase—a record of Evie's birth naming a stranger as her mother.
But lately, Nell has been haunted by hazy memories of their early life in Mississippi, years their reclusive mother, Hazel, has kept shrouded in secrecy. Evie recalls nothing before their house on Clay Mountain in North Carolina, but Nell remembers abrupt moves, odd accommodations, and the rainy night a man in a dark coat and a hat pulled low climbed their porch steps with a very little girl—Evie—then left without her.
In dual storylines, Nell, forty-two in 1971, reaches into the past to uncover dangerous, long-buried secrets, and Becca, a young mother in the early 1930s, presses ahead, each moving toward 1934, the catastrophic year that would forever link them.
From a windswept ghost town long forgotten, to a river house in notorious Natchez Under-the-Hill, to a moody nightclub stage, Evie's other mother emerges from the shadows of Depression-era Mississippi in a story of hardship and perseverance, of betrayal and trust, and of unexpected redemption in a world in which the lines between heroes and culprits are not always clearly drawn.
Kelly's Books
Praise
Kelly Mustian is a flat-out master storyteller. With a plot as woven and tumultuous as a river current, this story is a profoundly human tale simply dripping with will and strength and heart. Mustian’s storytelling insists there is magnificence amidst darkness if we only persevere. I am a fan.
— Andrew J. Graff, author of True North and Raft of Stars
A well-woven mystery that also plumbs the depths of the human heart, intertwining the power and wildness of the natural world and the risks people take for love. A novel about both running from the past and running after it, it woke me up early and kept me up late.
— Ash Davidson, author of Damnation Spring
With masterful prose, Kelly Mustian weaves together a generational saga that explores the ties that bind and the forces that seek to tear them apart. The River Knows Your Name is a richly atmospheric tapestry of hidden pasts, resilient spirits, and the human heart’s proclivity for tenacity and truth.
— Meagan Church, bestselling author of The Girls We Sent Away and The Last Carolina Girl
The River Knows Your Name is a captivating tale of love, loss and found family set in the lush and wild Mississippi Delta. Mustian’s plucky, determined female characters grip your heart. You won’t be able to put the book down until the last puzzle piece of their dual-timeline family mystery clicks into place.
— Emily Matchar, author of In the Shadow of the Greenbrier
About the Author
Kelly Mustian is the USA Today bestselling author of The Girls in the Stilt House and The River Knows Your Name. She is the recipient of the Mississippi Library Association's 2023 Author Award for Fiction, and The Girls in the Stilt House was shortlisted for the 2022 Crook's Corner Book Prize for best debut novel set in the American South. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and commercial magazines.
Originally from Mississippi, she currently lives in North Carolina. WEBSITE
