The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts - Paperback

by Tiya Miles (Author)

Three women uncover the secrets of a Georgia plantation that embodies the intertwined histories of Indigenous and enslaved Black communities--the fascinating debut novel, inspired by a true story, of the National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of All That She Carried, now featuring a new introduction and discussion guide.

"The Cherokee Rose is a mic drop--an instant classic. An invitation to listen to the urgent, sweet choruses of past and present."--Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST

Conducting research for her weekly history column, Jinx, a free-spirited Muscogee (Creek) historian, travels to Hold House, a Georgia plantation originally owned by Cherokee chief James Hold, to uncover the mystery of what happened to a tribal member who stayed behind after Indian removal, when Native Americans were forcibly displaced from their ancestral homelands in the nineteenth century.

At Hold House, she meets Ruth, a magazine writer visiting on assignment, and Cheyenne, a Southern Black debutante seeking to purchase the estate. Hovering above them all is the spirit of Mary Ann Battis, the young Indigenous woman who remained in Georgia more than a century earlier. When they discover a diary left on the property that reveals even more about the house's dark history, the three women's connections to the place grow deeper. Over a long holiday weekend, Cheyenne is forced to reconsider the property's rightful ownership, Jinx reexamines assumptions about her tribe's racial history, and Ruth confronts her own family's past traumas before surprising herself by falling into a new romance.

Imbued with a nuanced understanding of history, The Cherokee Rose brings the past to life as Jinx, Ruth, and Cheyenne unravel mysteries with powerful consequences for them all.

Author Biography

Tiya Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the author of All That She Carried, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Her book The Dawn of Detroit received the Merle Curti Award, the James A. Rawley Prize, the James Bradford Best Biography Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction, an American Book Award, and a Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Additionally, Miles is the author of Ties That Bind, The House on Diamond Hill, and Tales from the Haunted South, and the co-editor of Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds.