"When Gap Creek was published in 1999, it became an instant national bestseller, attracting hundreds of thousands of readers to the story of a marriage begun with love and hope at the turn of the twentieth century. Set in the Appalachian South, it followed Julie and Hank Richards as they struggled through the first year and a half of their union. But what of the years following? What did the future hold for these memorable characters?
The Road to Gap Creek answers those questions, as Robert Morgan takes us back into the lives of Julie and Hank as well as their children, seen through the eyes of their youngest daughter, Annie. Through Annie we watch the four Richards children create their own histories, lives that include both triumph and hardship in the face of the Great Depression and World War II.
Far more than a sequel, The Road from Gap Creek is a moving and indelible portrait of people and their world in a time of unprecedented change, an American story told by one of the country’s most acclaimed writers."
"Thomas Jefferson, a naturalist and visionary, dreamed that the United States would stretch across the continent from ocean to ocean. The account of how that dream became reality unfolds in the stories of Jefferson and nine other Americans whose adventurous spirits and lust for land pushed the westward boundaries: Andrew Jackson, John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman, David Crockett, Sam Houston, James K. Polk, Winfield Scott, Kit Carson, Nicholas Trist, and John Quincy Adams. Their tenacity was matched only by that of their enemies: the Mexican army under Santa Anna at the Alamo, the Comanche and Apache Indians, and the forbidding geography itself.
Known also for his powerful fiction (Gap Creek, The Truest Pleasure, Brave Enemies), Morgan uses his skill at characterization to give life to the personalities of these ten Americans without whom the United States might well have ended at the Arkansas border. Their stories—and those of the nameless thousands who risked their lives to settle on the frontier, displacing thousands of Native Americans—form an extraordinary chapter in American history that led directly to the cataclysm of the Civil War."
"Robert Morgan's Gap Creek was an Oprah's Book Club selection and a phenomenal New York Times best-seller. Here he turns his talent to chronicling the life of American frontier legend Daniel Boone. '[An] absorbing and stirring chronicle of the great frontiersman.'-Booklist, starred review"
"An Oprah's Book Club Selection
An unflinching tale of turn-of-the-century Appalachian life, Gap Creek chronicles the challenging first year in the marriage of Julie Harmon and Hank Richards. After losing both her father and brother before turning 17, Julie faces fire, flood, grifters, sickness, and starvation with grim determination and remarkable stamina. By capturing the earthy details of rural life, including raw, riveting accounts of everything from hog slaughtering to childbirth, Robert Morgan weaves the human and the heroic that coexist in every individual."
