Lit Chat Interview with USA Today Bestselling Author Kelly Mustian

A Haunting Southern Story Set in the Wild Mississippi Delta

Four years after Kelly Mustian's USA Today bestselling debut novel, The Girls in the Stilt House, started appearing on "must-read" lists and earning starred reviews, the author is set to release her much-anticipated second novel on April 1, 2025. Like her first, The River Knows Your Name is already gathering buzz as a tumultuous and "well-woven mystery."  

Emily Matchar, author of In the Shadow of the Greenbrier, wrote, "You won't be able to put the book down until the last puzzle piece of their dual-timeline family mystery clicks into place."

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Attend the Author Interview & Book Signing

Kelly Mustian was in conversation with interviewer Jane Wood on Monday, April 7, 2025 at the Beaches Branch Library. This program was made possible by the support of the Friends of the Beaches Branch Library.

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The River Knows Your Name

For nearly thirty years, Nell has kept a childhood promise to never reveal what she and Evie found tucked inside a copy of Jane Eyre in their mother’s bookcase—a record of Evie’s birth listing a stranger as her mother. But lately, Nell has been haunted by hazy memories of their early life in Mississippi, years their reclusive mother, Hazel, has kept shrouded in secrecy. In dual storylines decades apart, Nell, forty-two in 1971, reaches into the past to uncover dangerous, long-buried secrets, and Becca, a young mother in the early 1930s, presses ahead, each moving toward 1934, the catastrophic year that would forever link them.

From a windswept ghost town long forgotten to a river house in notorious Natchez Under-the-Hill to a moody nightclub stage, Evie’s other mother emerges from the shadows of Depression-era Mississippi in a story of hardship and perseverance, of betrayal and trust, and of unexpected redemption in a world in which the lines between heroes and culprits are not always clearly drawn.

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Kelly Mustian is the USA Today bestselling author of The Girls in the Stilt House and The River Knows Your Name. She is the recipient of the Mississippi Library Association’s 2023 Author Award for Fiction, and The Girls in the Stilt House was shortlisted for the 2022 Crook’s Corner Book Prize for best debut novel set in the American South. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and commercial magazines. Originally from Mississippi, she currently lives in North Carolina.

Read Her Work

Check out Kelly's books from the Library: https://jaxpl.na4.iiivega.com/search?query=Kelly%20Mustian&searchType=agent&pageSize=10 

Did you know that all of our Lit Chat authors' books count toward your Jax Stacks Reading Challenge completion? Find out what authors we're hosting this month and join in on the fun: https://jaxpubliclibrary.libnet.info/events?term=lit+chat&n=180&r=days 

Interviewer Jane R. Wood is the author of six award-winning juvenile fiction books where she weaves history and science into stories filled with mystery, adventure, and humor for young readers ages 8-14. She has also written a nonfiction how-to book for authors called Schools: A Niche Market for Authors. Note: All of her books are available at Jacksonville Public Library.

You May Also Like...

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Read-Alikes for Kelly Mustian

• The Women by Kristin Hannah
• The Briar Club by Kate Quinn
• None of This is True by Lisa Jewell
• Call Your Daughter Home by Deb Spera
• This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger
• The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters
• The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger
• If the Creek Don’t Rise by Leah Weiss
• The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon
• Only the Beautiful by Susan Meissner
• Find Me by Alafair Burke

 

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