Stranger Here Below

The caution this has scored into Mary Elizabeth has made her defensive and too private and limited her ambitions, despite her gifts as a musician. But Maze's earthy fearlessness might be enough to carry them both forward toward lives lived bravely in an angry world that changes by the day.

Both of them are drawn to the enigmatic Georginea Ward, an aging idealist who taught at Berea sixty years ago, fell in love with a black man, and suddenly found herself renamed as a sister in a tiny Shaker community. Sister Georgia believes in discipline and simplicity, yes. But, more important, her faith is rooted in fairness and the long reach of unconditional love.

This is a novel about three generations of women and the love that makes families where none can be expected.

Joyce Hinnefeld is the author of the acclaimed novel, In Hovering Flight. Her work has appeared in The Denver Quarterly, The Greensboro Review, 13th Moon, the anthology Many Lights in Many Windows: Twenty Years of Great Fiction and Poetry from The Writers Community, and other publications. Her short story collection Tell Me Everything (University Press of New England, 1998) received the 1997 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize in Fiction. She is an Associate Professor of English at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA.