Abingdon Launch-The Fence My Father Built

Here is the final featured book for Abingdon's launch of its new fiction line. This line is doing well, and I've recently heard of more novels being acquired for future publication. Linda Clare has this to say about her writing journey:


At age twelve, I was sickly, and had to stay out of school for days at a time. From my bed I pounded out stories and poems on an Underwood manual typewriter given to me by a great-aunt, and published in a national market at age seventeen. Then life intervened for about twenty-five years. When I started in again, learning to write well took a fifteen year apprenticeship, writing poems and short personal essays. I wrote my first novel by the seat of my pants, snagged a big-time New York agent, who couldn’t sell the book, and I was back to square one. Then I got the chance to coauthor a nonfiction book called Lost Boys and the Moms Who Love Them with pals Melody Carlson and Heather Kopp. I did two more coauthor nonfiction projects with Kristen Ingram, who writes for “Weavings Magazine.” All the while I had this little fiction habit. I’d written a second novel, The Fence My Father Built. More than ten years and dozens of “nos” after I began Fence, Abingdon said yes. And even that was a miracle—Melody Carlson mentioned my novel to Abingdon’s Barbara Scott and dear, sweet Barbara said I deserved a chance.

The Fence My Father Built is contemporary women’s fiction about finding your way home—even when home is a rundown trailer in the middle of nowhere. All her life Muri Pond dreamed of finding the father who left her when she was five years old. Now it’s too late. Joe Pond has died, willing his remote central Oregon high-desert property to his citified daughter, a librarian who’d rather research than ranch. When legally separated Muri hauls teenage Nova and eleven-year-old Truman to her inherited property, she’s confronted by a troublesome neighbor and her father’s legacy—a fence made from old oven doors. Along with Aunt Lutie and the Red Rock Tabernacle Ladies, Muri must rediscover the faith her alcoholic Native-American dad somehow never abandoned.

Buy the paperback version of The Fence My Father Built
Buy it on Kindle