Join Page 158 Books as we welcome back author Robert Gwaltney to celebrate his novel, Sing Down the Moon--a Southern Gothic tale of generational trauma exploring inheritance, addiction, identity. It’s a story about the legacies, particularly the legacies that women carry, the ghosts we inherit, and the costs of breaking free.
Sixteen-year-old Leontyne Skye longs to escape Good Hope, a barrier island off the coast of Georgia—and the cursed birthright that binds her to it. For generations, the women of the Skye line have tended Damascus, an ancient fig tree whose siren song lures the dead across the river. The figs it bears are harvested to create Redemption, a drug that tethers the island to the dead, slowly consuming the Skye women from the inside out.
Leontyne’s mother, Eulalee, is already disappearing—memory, hair, teeth—into the salt-stung air. And Leontyne is unraveling too, since the accident known as Tribulation Day, when she lost her hand and all sense of who she was before. As her memories resurface in fractured pieces, and her childhood friends, Rebecca and Avery, twist truth to their own ends, Leontyne faces a cruel inheritance aiming to destroy her.
When Journey Wintergarden arrives, mysterious and magnetic, precarious relationships unravel, threatening to upend everything, derailing Leontyne’s plans to escape Good Hope. As desire, betrayal, and memory collide, the haints grow restless. Leontyne’s refusal to tend the tree means shattering the fragile balance between the living and the dead. Accepting her fate means becoming the Great Redeemer—and losing herself completely.
Robert Gwaltney, a recipient of the 2022 Pat Conroy Writers Residency, was named 2023 Georgia Author of the Year for his debut novel, The Cicada Tree. He resides in Atlanta Georgia where he is an active member of the Atlanta literary community serving as a board member for Broadleaf Writers Association. Robert’s work has appeared in such publications as Southbound Magazine, Southern Literary Review, The Blue Mountain Review, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. His forthcoming novel, Sing Down The Moon, which has been awarded the Somerset Award for Literary and Contemporary Fiction, will be published by Mercer University Press in the Spring of 2026.
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