From the acclaimed author of The Girls in the Stilt House comes a long-awaited novel both atmospheric and lyrical, a haunting Southern story about memory, family secrets, and fierce and fragile love.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Kelly Mustian’s The River Knows Your Name, which releases on April 1st 2025.
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 naming 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. Evie recalls nothing before their house on Clay Mountain in North Carolina, but Nell remembers abrupt moves, odd accommodations, and the rainy night a man in a dark coat and a hat pulled low climbed their porch steps with a very little girl―Evie―then left without her.
In dual storylines, 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.
BECCA
Becca sat on a bench by a window in the living room, a book open in her hands though the daylight was fading and she hadn’t yet switched on the lamp. Would-be rain hung heavy in clouds dark against the silvering sky. She had left the front door open behind her after coming home from work at Dr. Carson’s office, an unusually cool September breeze too welcome to bar, even with the screen door off its hinges awaiting repair—an invitation to night bugs.
She could hear Lottie in the kitchen tapping lids back onto paint cans with the wooden handle of a screwdriver, done for the day with whatever she had been painting. Perhaps the cupboard again, or the kitchen chairs. Maybe the buttons on her winter coat or the mate to yesterday’s shoe.
The sound sent Becca’s gaze to the painted morning-glory vines that twined a gray flood line circling the room a few inches high on the walls. Lottie had embellished it rather than painting over it, acknowledging the great flood of ’27, four years back, that had left only a faint mark on their own lives, but had ravaged towns up and down the lower Mississippi River Valley. Lottie, who had been Becca’s second mother for most of Becca’s life, referred to the morning glories as her collaborative work with the river and had signed it in one corner with her usual Carlotta! underscored with two tiny waves. That, like most everything about Lottie, had delighted Becca. Never mind that a young Becca had been informed by more than one schoolmate that Lottie was known as the town nut. Becca had been undaunted by such talk, by the whispers of children in the schoolyard and the snide looks from the town’s elite. Now, at twenty- one, Becca still held that Lottie was the most interesting and brilliant mother in town, rendering all the others utterly ordinary.
Mapleton had loved Lottie once. In the first few years after she arrived there, before Becca came to live with her and for a time afterward, she had been something of a local celebrity, her oil paintings—landscapes and portraits, mostly—having earned her a respectable, though modest, income. Her reputation had spread beyond Mapleton, some of her riverscapes selling to buyers as far away as Nashville and New Orleans, one hanging in a gallery up north somewhere. At home, she had been in high demand, painting portraits for the more affluent families in town, some of whom, those of a certain old-money set, hung them in gilded frames in the ornate foyers of their tarnished antebellum homes.
In time, Lottie had grown weary of all that. She gave up commissioned portraits, painting instead only those faces she found especially interesting, most often farmers or laundresses, the elderly or the very young, misfits of various sorts, some of whom she enfolded as chosen family. Those portraits she gave away, which did not go over well with her former patrons. And with that, the eccentricities that had once lent Lottie an artistic mystique were recast in an unfavorable light.
These days, Lottie preferred painting items around the house, works that, as she told Becca, made her happy when she caught sight of them as she went about life. She had painted intricate borders around their mirrors and doors, and a trompe l’oeil sparrow hatched from an egg on the stovepipe. Their bread box was a masterpiece.
The two of them, Lottie and Becca, were so close that Becca had needed a week to decide if she would rather live with Lottie when Ben Chambers asked her to marry him. She loved Ben, but she had loved Lottie longer. In the end, Ben had won her over, with Lottie’s blessing—perhaps because of Lottie’s urging—and on this evening, this seemingly ordinary evening, Becca was six days shy of her wedding.
As twilight dusked the living room, Becca closed her book. Lottie came in from the kitchen to sit beside her on the plain pine bench by the window, taking Becca’s hand, as she often did of late, and humming softly. Becca was about to ask her what she had been painting that day, when a lightning bolt flashed sky-to-earth outside the window, chased by an earsplitting thunderclap that startled them both. Immediately following, as if tossed by a divine hand, a yellow globe of electric light rolled through the open doorway. Neither woman spoke as the ghostly sphere, roughly the size of a melon, glided soundlessly into the room. It passed by them mere inches from Lottie’s knee. Becca barely breathed. As it continued on, they watched, frozen, as if the slightest movement might draw the thing toward them. They saw it rise slightly, and before Becca could collect herself enough to determine a course of action, the lightning ball found the open window across the room and whirled out into the gloaming.
“What on earth…?” Becca was still clutching Lottie’s hand. “If that thing had hit one of us…” Then she was on her feet and dashing across the room to slam the door against whatever it was.
“Lovely,” Lottie whispered, her eyes gleaming. Then they were glistening, and a tear slid down her face.
“Lottie? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re crying. What is it?”
Lottie stood, her face lined with worry even as her eyes were still lit with a kind of wonder. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said, laying her hand briefly on Becca’s shoulder before turning back to the kitchen.
Lottie was quieter than usual the rest of that evening. Unlike Becca, she did not seem to have been shaken by what had happened. Rather, there was a peacefulness about her, something pensive in her mood that quieted Becca as well.
Becca might have dismissed the whole eerie encounter as something dreamed in the night had she not awakened the next morning to a steady fall of rain and a newly painted image of the lightning ball on the inside of the front door, exactly where it had made its entrance. And though Becca generally viewed herself as the practical counterpoint to Lottie’s whimsical nature, she was left with a sense that the odd visitation, which surely had its basis in science, was, somehow, portentous.
Six months to the day after the lightning ball rolled through the living room, Lottie’s long- held theory—that in the hereafter, all souls, raised to their most exquisite states, are equally and blissfully at home—was tested. The pilot of a towboat pushing a barge up the river sighted Lottie’s body in the water, lodged in a tangle of wood debris on the east bend at Mapleton, and as he hastily marked the location, a current caught her up and set her free. Becca was bereft.
It was Dr. Carson who delivered the news to her. He rang Becca’s nearest neighbor in possession of a telephone in Kendall, where she and Ben had been renting an apartment in a divided house since their marriage. It seemed, the doctor told her in his practiced, clinical manner, that a man walking atop the levee had seen Lottie earlier on that tragic afternoon, sitting at the foot of the levee, close to the river’s edge. Too close, the man had suggested. A comparison of that man’s account and the description reported by the towboat pilot had satisfied the sheriff that the woman seen in the river was Lottie.
There was more that Becca should know, Dr. Carson said. Sensitive issues best addressed in person. And Ace Harper would need to speak with her when she was up to making a trip to Mapleton. Ace had drawn up Lottie’s will. There would be papers to sign.
“Take whatever time you need,” the doctor told her. “No immediate arrangements are necessary.” Meaning, Becca realized, that there would be no funeral arrangements to make, no tombstone to order for Lottie, no gathering around a grave in that town that had not deserved her. In her dazed state, Becca thought that was just as well. There was a morbid mercy in Lottie’s beloved river having given her passage to the beyond.
“Of course, rumors are going about, as is usual in these situations,” she heard Dr. Carson say through the fog that had engulfed her. “I hope you won’t take them to heart.”
NELL
As children, we shared the same small spaces, walked the same dusty roads, woke to the same views outside our windows, but Evie’s world had more colors than mine.
“Mama is red,” she announced to me one day, “and Maggie is lavender. And you,” she said, pointing at my reflection in the mirror over the sink as I brushed my teeth, “are clear.”
That about summed things up.
“What color are you?” I asked her once, and she hesitated before whispering “turquoise,” as if there were something shameful, or marvelous, about being blue- green.
Evie’s friends all had identifying colors. Every number, every letter, every musical note, anything that could be touched or smelled or heard or otherwise experienced had, for Evie, the extra dimension of hue. She would try to explain it, and I would try to understand.
“It’s like summer,” she might offer. “What color is summer, Nell? Just try.”
“Green, I guess.”
Her eyes would light for a second, then she would fire off something else. “And sky?”
“Blue?”
“Oh,” she would say, and any hope that I might ever under stand her beautiful mind would be dashed for us both.
The day Evie discovered we weren’t really sisters, I pretended to be as surprised as she was, both of us staring wide- eyed at a certificate we’d found tucked inside a copy of Jane Eyre in our mother’s bookcase. Evie was ten then, and no longer aware of anything before Mama and me. But I knew that Evie had come to us almost two years old, not as an infant, and that she had arrived on my sixth birthday. An unexpected gift.
When we unfolded the paper that accounted for her birth and noted the strange name next to Mother— Becca P. Chambers— I cried, so alarming Evie that she swore never to tell anyone what we had discovered. She stroked my hair and wiped my face with her fingertips and promised that I would be her sister until the day she died. That no one would ever know. She thought I was crying because we were not born sisters, or because I was afraid of our mother’s reaction if we were found out. But seeing that name, I was devastated at the sure knowledge that Evie, with her tumble of curls and her sweet charm and all her colors, had a mother other than ours and I did not. It was almost more than I could bear.
In bed that night, I tried to remember Evie in those first days after she arrived. And though I had not entirely forgotten life in that house— blue like a robin’s egg and so close to a railroad track that the floorboards trembled when a train rumbled by— only snatches of memory were left to me. I could picture Evie eating oatmeal from a white bowl with a blue rim, could see her standing in front of a window, her doll, Maggie, dangling from her hand. And I could still call to mind, sharp and clear and stirring a vague sense of unease, a boxy green truck parked in front of the house on that rainy night— my birthday— and a figure in a dark coat and a hat pulled low climbing the front steps with a small child— Evie— then turning back to the truck alone.
I could recall almost nothing else of the time before our mother, my mother, moved us away from that house by the tracks. But later, in another house, the house on Clay Mountain, there was a night when I woke to the muffled sound of Evie cry-ing in our bed and looked over to see her sitting up, the blanket pulled over her knees, her face buried in it.
“What’s wrong, Evie?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she sobbed. “It’s a silver feeling.” Then she curled up close to me and rested her head on my shoulder until she fell asleep.
Silver, I know now, is the color of loss.
