A Bend In The Willow

A Bend In The Willow
350 - 88,000 words Pages
ISBN 9781370816842

In 1965 in Willowood, Kentucky, 17-year-old Robin Lee Carter meets violence with violence. She grabs what she can and runs for her life, finally escaping the horrors of her family home and disappears. Forever.

Twenty years later, in Tucson, Arizona, she has a new name, a new husband, a new home and adorable 5-year-old son named Michael. Life couldn’t get much sweeter. But inside the new house, Robin Lee hides secrets…secrets she never wants revealed…secrets buried back in Kentucky. For Michael’s 5th birthday, they buy him a gelding. How could they know this gesture would be the beginning of their undoing? Michael is thrown from the horse and hospitalized. Blood tests reveal a chemo-resistant leukemia. Neither parent is a match. What mother wouldn’t trade her life for her son? For Robin Lee, she just may need to. Those buried secrets are about to resurface. To find a bone marrow match, Robin Lee goes to the one place she never wanted to go…home. But how do you ask for bone marrow from the one person you betrayed, in a town where everyone things you are dead?

Susan Clayton-Goldner

About Susan Clayton-Goldner (Grants Pass, Oregon Author)

Susan Clayton-Goldner

Susan Clayton-Goldner was born in New Castle, Delaware and grew up with four brothers along the banks of the Delaware River. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona's Creative Writing Program and has been writing most of her life. Her novels have been finalists for The Hemingway Award, the Heeken Foundation Fellowship, the Writers Foundation and the Publishing On-line Contest. Susan won the National Writers' Association Novel Award twice for unpublished novels and her poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including Animals as Teachers and Healers, published by Ballantine Books, Our Mothers/Ourselves, by the Greenwood Publishing Group, The Hawaii Pacific Review-Best of a Decade, and New Millennium Writings. A collection of her poems, A Question of Mortality was released in 2014 by Wellstone Press. Prior to writing full time, Susan worked as the Director of Corporate Relations for University Medical Center in Tucson, Arizona.

Susan shares a life in Grants Pass, Oregon with her husband, Andreas, her fictional characters, and more books than one person could count.