On a trip to Savannah, I found a bronze statue by the river. I asked a shop clerk about The Waving Girl and he told me a story of desperate love, of loss and redemption. I spent three days in the archives and over three years researching, reading and rewriting this story based on Florence Martus and her brother George, a lighthouse keeper.

Linda Sands’s We’re Not Waving, We’re Drowning, is a haunting, multi-generational commercial southern women’s novel set in Savannah between 1894 and the present. It’s not a mystery, even though a man disappears. And it’s not a romance, even though the three protagonists—each living in a different era—do fall in love. Rather it’s a big, meaty meal of a novel about women searching for family and discovering strength and loss and identity in a changing world and at particularly transitional times of their lives.