Katrine: A Novel

Katrine Dulany is the daughter of a man hired to run a North Carolina plantation. Francis Ravenel is the charming heir who returns home to find her already there, the overseer's daughter with sharp eyes and a quiet defiance. What begins as curiosity becomes something neither can escape, even as the weight of class and circumstance presses down on them. Her father's drinking casts a long shadow across the estate, and the world around them demands certain choices, certain silences. Elinor Macartney Lane writes with quiet precision about the things people cannot say and the feelings they cannot name. This is a novel about love that arrives too soon or too late, and the particular cruelty of wanting what the world has decided you cannot have. For readers who appreciate historical fiction that attends to the interior life, who want romance with actual stakes.