SEMPERVIRENS

A Novel

It's 1874, and Nellie Flaherty, 23, is going down in a cultural backwater of San Francisco. She learns early on that female people own nothing. The best thing a girl might think she has going—sex—turns out to mean a really good chance of dying a horrible death, like her mother, like her best friend. Nellie hasn't seen the husband she suspects of cheating for more than a week. Her little brother who ran away to sea has just returned to tell her he's an opium addict. Her father is sinking into raging dementia. She suddenly finds herself in charge of two small boys and her father's farm. The vegetables aren't picked, the animals need feeding, the bread needs baking, and the mangle just broke in the middle of a double wash load. Worse than a bad hair day, yes, but not all that unusual in The Redwoods, a logged-out lumber town.

Motherless, Nellie raised her little brother and kept her father's household until she was 17 and tried to run away. Big mistake. But then she married a man to take her away from the drudgery of her father's farm. Bigger mistake. Nellie jumped from the frying pan of her domineering father to the hellish fire of married life. Nellie doesn't have a way out, but she finds a way to live...and a surprising way to love.

First Place winner in the California Writers' Club 2007 Jack London Writers Contest, and First Place winner in the San Francisco Area Romance Writers of America "Heart to Heart" contest, Sempervirens tells Nellie's story. Like the mighty coast redwood tree, sequoia sempervirens, which sprouts new growth from ever-living roots even when its main trunk is killed, Nellie learns how to regenerate a rich life from core-killing loss.

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