At Home in Persimmon Hollow

At Home in Persimmon Hollow is the first book in a series chronicling the world of Agnes Foster and the people of frontier-era Florida. In 1886, Agnes Foster is forced to leave the Catholic orphanage in New York where she grew up to start a new life as a teacher in Persimmon Hollow, Florida, a town she has only ever seen in a newspaper ad. With nothing but her strong Catholic faith to sustain her, she leaves behind the only home she's ever known and the little girl she hopes to adopt, and encounters a wild and beautiful new landscape, and a town full of hardworking, faith-filled people. She also meets the difficult, yet handsome and hard-to-ignore Seth Taylor, a man whose heart has been hardened to God after a terrible loss. Just as Agnes starts to feel Persimmon Hollow could be a good home for her and her daughter, and that Seth could be her love, tragedy strikes in the form of a trio of evil men from both their pasts, intent on doing them more harm. Will their fragile new love survive? Will Seth return to his faith? Can Agnes finally escape her dark past and find a bright new future?

The audio edition of this book can be downloaded via Audible.

Gerri Bauer has a B.A. in English from Stetson University, where she works in social media and online marketing and volunteers for their campus ministry program. She was born and raised in New York City but has deep roots in Florida, where she lives with her husband, spoils her cats, and keeps tabs on a far-flung extended family. She edited The Parce Letters: Voices from the Past, a collection of primary sources on pioneer settlers in Florida. This is her first novel.