The Deliverance of Barker McRae: A Novel

It's a wintry April 1833 in Watkinsville, Georgia. Fourteen-year-old Barker McRae is stuck living with her odious uncle, militia captain Wiley Wood, as she waits for her father, a Methodist circuit rider, to return. Instead, a stranger arrives. Matthew Higgenbotham, a land lottery messenger who dreams of leaving Georgia, shows up at Wiley's farm with unexpected news: Barker has won forty acres in the latest state lottery. His announcement sets in motion an act of unimaginable violence, a harrowing escape, and a cat-and-mouse chase across frontier Georgia during America's first gold rush and the illegal seizure of Cherokee lands. With Higgenbotham as her reluctant ally, Barker's mission is clear: escape her uncle and reunite with her father. Or should she free herself from them both? And what about the troubled aunt she has left behind? Set against the backdrop of the Georgia Gold Rush, alongside the era of Methodist circuit riders and early nineteenth-century evangelists, THE DELIVERANCE OF BARKER MCRAE weaves fiction and meticulously researched history to introduce readers to two travelers, thrown together by luck and duty, on an adventure neither of them wanted. This is a tale about trespass, frontier religion, fathers and daughters, and friendships between unlikely companions. It's also about what it means to make a moral choice in a profoundly immoral historical moment. Read more