Ocean House Author Series: Mary Alice Monroe
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Ocean House Author Series: Mary Alice Monroe
Join us as Ocean House owner and award-winning author, Deborah Goodrich Royce moderates a conversation with a featured author. This week, New York Times bestselling author Mary Alice Monroe will be discussing (and signing) her latest novel: Where The Rivers Merge.
Tickets include wine, light bites, and a signed copy of the featured book, from Martin House Books.
About the Author:
Mary Alice Monroe is the New York Times bestselling author of 30 books for adults and children. Mary Alice has earned numerous accolades and awards including induction into the South Carolina Academy of Authors’ Hall of Fame; South Carolina Center for the Book Award for Writing; the South Carolina Award for Literary Excellence; the SW Florida Author of Distinction Award; the RT Lifetime Achievement Award; the International Book Award for Green Fiction; the Henry Bergh Award for Children’s Fiction; and her novel A Lowcountry Christmas won the prestigious Southern Prize for Fiction. Mary Alice is also the co-founder of the popular weekly web show and podcast Friends & Fiction. Mary Alice has championed the fragility of the earth’s wild habitat. The coastal southern landscape in particular is a strong and important focus of many of her novels. For her writing, Monroe immerses herself in academic research, works with wildlife experts, and does hands-on volunteering with animals, then crafts captivating stories that identify important parallels between nature and human nature. Sea turtles, bottlenose dolphins, monarch butterflies, raptors, and shorebirds are among the species she has worked with and woven into her novels. Mary Alice is also an active conservationist and serves on several boards including the South Carolina Aquarium board emeritus, the Pat Conroy Literary Center Honorary Board, and the Leatherback Trust, for which she received the Leatherback Trust Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022. Mary Alice splits her time between her home on the South Carolina coast and her home in the North Carolina mountains. When she’s not writing a novel, she is with her family or busy working with wildlife somewhere in the world.
About Where The Rivers Merge: From New York Times bestselling author Mary Alice Monroe, comes her highly anticipated epic and triumphant new novel—a celebration of the land and spirit of the early twentieth-century Lowcountry. 1908: The Lowcountry of South Carolina is at the cusp of change. Mayfield, the grand estate held for generations by the Rivers family, is the treasured home of young Eliza. Free spirited, she refuses to be confined by societal norms. Instead, Eliza revels in exploring the golden fields and sparkling ponds of Mayfield, observing wildlife, and riding horses. But her halcyon days are cut short by the Great War, coastal storms, and unexpected challenges to Mayfield. As Eliza battles personal pains and the ravages of family turmoil over the years, her love and devotion for the natural world puts her on a collision course with the patriarchal traditions of a bygone era. 1988: At 88, Eliza is the scion of the Rivers/DeLancey family. She’s fought a lifetime to save her beloved Mayfield and is too independent and committed to quietly retire and leave the fate of the estate to her greedy son. She must make decisions that will assure the future of the land and her family—or watch them both be split apart. Set against the evocative landscape of the twentieth-century American South, Where the Rivers Merge is a dramatic and sweeping multigenerational family story of unyielding love, lessons learned, profound sacrifices, and the indomitable spirit of a woman determined to persevere in the face of change in order to protect her family legacy and the land she loves.
