Clark Memorial Library

A 2017 New York Times bestseller, Lisa Wingate’s Before We Were Yours is a haunting and compelling work of historical fiction told in polyvocal form with two alternating principle voices narrating a story of complex family history. From chapter to chapter, the book goes back and forth between present day South Carolina (in settings of Southern power and prestige) and Tennessee in the late 1930s and early 1940s (in settings of squalor and abuse). In attempting to map out a family’s history, the novel also reads as an engaging mystery with a smart, soulful young lawyer leading the detective work, hunting to learn the full truth of her now senile grandmother’s life.