'In 1913, on a summer’s day at Half Moon Lake, Louisiana, four-year-old Sonny Davenport walks into the woods and never returns.
'The boy’s mysterious disappearance from the family’s lake house makes front-page news in their home town of Opelousas. John Henry and Mary Davenport are wealthy and influential, and will do anything to find their son. For two years, the Davenports search across the South, offer increasingly large rewards and struggle not to give in to despair.
'Then, at the moment when all hope seems lost, the boy is found in the company of a tramp.
'But is he truly Sonny Davenport? The circumstances of his discovery raise more questions than answers. And when Grace Mill, an unwed farm worker, travels from Alabama to lay claim to the child, newspapers, townsfolk, even the Davenports’ own friends, take sides.
'As the tramp’s kidnapping trial begins, and two desperate mothers fight for ownership of the boy, the people of Opelousas discover that truth is more complicated than they’d ever dreamed...'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Dedication: For Dave, Liam, Milo
Epigraph: 'No one can pass through life, any more than he can pass through a bit of country, without leaving tracks behind, and those tracks may often be helpful to those coming after him in finding their way.' - Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys
A Conversation with Kirsten Alexander
Chris Gordon
(interviewer),
2019
23469088
2019
single work
podcast
interview
'Hear our events manager Chris Gordon in conversation with Kirsten Alexander about her captivating new historical novel Half Moon Lake, which was inspired by a real case in America's Deep South about a lost boy and the two mothers who both seek to claim him.' (Production summary)
'What is it that so fascinates us about lost children? Whether fact or fiction, their stories keep surfacing: Azaria Chamberlain, Jaidyn Leskie, the Beaumont children, or the schoolgirls Joan Lindsay dreamed up for her 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock. Indeed, those girls have wafted through so many subsequent incarnations in books, a play, a film, and a television series that some people are convinced they were real and that the story of their disappearance is true.' (Introduction)
'What is it that so fascinates us about lost children? Whether fact or fiction, their stories keep surfacing: Azaria Chamberlain, Jaidyn Leskie, the Beaumont children, or the schoolgirls Joan Lindsay dreamed up for her 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock. Indeed, those girls have wafted through so many subsequent incarnations in books, a play, a film, and a television series that some people are convinced they were real and that the story of their disappearance is true.' (Introduction)
A Conversation with Kirsten Alexander
Chris Gordon
(interviewer),
2019
23469088
2019
single work
podcast
interview
'Hear our events manager Chris Gordon in conversation with Kirsten Alexander about her captivating new historical novel Half Moon Lake, which was inspired by a real case in America's Deep South about a lost boy and the two mothers who both seek to claim him.' (Production summary)
