Overview

Winner - 2013 Rainbow Award for Best Lesbian Historical Romance
Winner - 2013 Rainbow Award for Best Lesbian Debut
Finalist - 2014 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Winner - 2014 Golden Crown Ann Bannon Popular Choice
Winner - 2014 Goldie Award for Dramatic/General Fiction

"The story unfolds like a flower; the impact of it on each person is profound. It’s a spectacular offering of love gained, lost, and struggled with over a lifetime—a poignant tale with a marvelous reveal at the end."—Anna Furtado, Lambda Literary Review

"Letters Never Sent is a crisp, well-written story that is chock full of strong imagery, indelible characters, and conflict that almost any woman can relate to in one way or another. Her transitions between the past and present work seamlessly, and she is able to capture the floodwaters of joy, love, heartbreak, and sorrow with unhurried profundity." -- Salem West, The Rainbow Reader

Three women, united by love and kinship, struggle to conform to the social norms of the times in which they lived.

In 1931, Katherine Henderson leaves behind her small town in Kansas and the marriage proposal of a local boy to live on her own and work at the Sears & Roebuck glove counter in Chicago. There she meets Annie—a bold, outspoken feminist who challenges Katherine’s idea of who she thinks she is and what she thinks she wants in life.

In 1997, Katherine’s daughter, Joan, travels to Lawrence, Kansas, to clean out her estranged mother’s house. Hidden away in an old suitcase, she finds a wooden box containing trinkets and a packet of sealed letters to a person identified only by a first initial.

Joan reads the unsent letters and discovers a woman completely different from the aloof and unyielding mother of her youth–a woman who had loved deeply and lost that love to circumstances beyond her control. Now she just has to find the strength to use the healing power of empathy and forgiveness to live the life she’s always wanted to live.