The River Knows Your Name

A Novel

By: Kelly Mustian

Narrated by: Lisa Larsen

For nearly thirty years, Nell has kept a childhood promise to never reveal what she and Evie found tucked inside a copy of Jane Eyre in their mother's bookcase—a record of Evie's birth naming a stranger as her mother. But lately, Nell has been haunted by hazy memories of their early life in Mississippi, years their reclusive mother, Hazel, has kept shrouded in secrecy. Evie recalls nothing before their house on Clay Mountain in North Carolina, but Nell remembers abrupt moves, odd accommodations, and the rainy night a man in a dark coat and a hat pulled low climbed their porch steps with a very little girl—Evie—then left without her.

In dual storylines, Nell, forty-two in 1971, reaches into the past to uncover dangerous, long-buried secrets, and Becca, a young mother in the early 1930s, presses ahead, each moving toward 1934, the catastrophic year that would forever link them.

From a windswept ghost town long forgotten, to a river house in notorious Natchez Under-the-Hill, to a moody nightclub stage, Evie's other mother emerges from the shadows of Depression-era Mississippi in a story of hardship and perseverance, of betrayal and trust, and of unexpected redemption in a world in which the lines between heroes and culprits are not always clearly drawn.

©2025 Kelly Mustian (P)2025 Tantor Media

Southern fiction at its best

Engaging storyline. Love the way you know it’s going to come together in the end but you’re not sure exactly how until it happens. Excellent author.

Outstanding story!

Love the dual timeline, the readers ability to convey the feelings of the characters, just all of it.

Great story

Good story Little hard to keep up on the changing decades, but overall a very good book

Terrible book

whole story jumping from one character to other character every episode repeating the same conversation