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Title: New Historical Novel Explores Family Secrets and Survival in the Antebellum South

United Kingdom, 13th Nov 2026 – About the Book: In Dixie’s Land by Louise Scattergood traces the story of nine-year-old Ada-Mary and her mother Kitty, who flee England in March 1849 after a violent confrontation ends their life under an abusive household. Traveling under new names, the pair cross the Atlantic and make their way through Charleston, Georgia, and into Tennessee in search of Ada-Mary’s biological father, Salem Marwick.Upon reaching the Sullivan family’s cotton plantation, Three Meadows, in Davidson County, they discover a complex extended household that includes adoptive relatives, siblings, and the realities of Southern plantation life. The novel follows Ada-Mary’s gradual integration into this world, the gradual revelation of long-held family secrets, and the bonds formed across blood and circumstance. As the years pass, the narrative moves through courtship, illness, and the growing political tensions that culminate in the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861. The final sections depict the family’s forced separation under external threat as the Civil War begins.The story remains grounded in the characters’ personal experiences of loss, loyalty, and adaptation within the social and historical constraints of the mid-nineteenth-century American South.Key Highlights:Centers on a mother-daughter escape from England in 1849 and their search for a lost father in Tennessee.Depicts daily life on a Davidson County cotton plantation and the internal dynamics of a large extended Southern family.Addresses themes of illegitimacy, childhood trauma, adoptive kinship, and the moral complexities of the antebellum South.Spans the period from the late 1840s through the opening days of the Civil War, including the impact of Fort Sumter.Incorporates the perspectives of both wh...

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