Kathy Watson spent years as a public relations executive and journalist, including six as editor-in-chief of Oregon Business magazine, before embarking on a new career as a chef and restaurant owner. This is her debut novel. She lives in Hood River, Oregon, where she writes, leads a chefs collective, and runs and hikes the Columbia River Gorge with her husband Stu and Satchel, the world’s best dog.

In the shadow of the Great Depression and Jim Crow south of the 1930s, an impoverished white family escapes—with the help of Black sharecroppers—from a vengeful Mississippi plantation overseer intent on lynching them. Arriving in California to start a new life, Barney and Lula Stovall are haunted by the past, the children they’ve left behind, and the daughter they cannot love or protect.

Orphans of the Living follows the peripatetic life of the Stovall family, woven from four parallel stories: Barney and Lula Stovall, and two of their nine children, Glen and Nora Mae.

Their California sojourn—from their hardscrabble dairy farm, to the brig at the San Francisco Presidio, to the building of the Golden Gate Bridge—lead them on paths toward each other and forgiveness. But redemption doesn’t come to them all.