CAROLINA TWILIGHT
When Elaine’s father uproots the family for a new job in a faraway place, she falls into a deep depression. At seventeen, she is so unhappy that all she wants to do is end her life.
After a suicide attempt and a brief hospitalization, Elaine finds temporary relief in medications, but a disappointment in love soon plunges her into despair even worse than before. On a trip back to Charleston, her childhood home, she discovers a quick and easy way to kill herself. While she makes her deadly plans, however, a series of unexpected and startling revelations cause her to reconsider, and she realizes that something, or someone, wants her to live...
Based on the author’s own experiences, Carolina Twilight realistically explores the tragic and now epidemic problems of teenage depression and suicide, while ultimately offering a message of redemption and hope.
AN EVERLASTING CIRCLE is one of the most moving and significant collection of wartime letters ever published. The eminent historian Douglas Southall Freeman called an 1863 letter written by Col. Alexander C. Haskell one of the most beautiful and noblest of the war. For the first time, all of Col. Haskell's letters have been collected, along with those of his six brothers, most of whom were Confederate officers, as well as the correspondence of his parents and other relations.
As an archivist, I have worked with historical manuscripts for 25 years, and I consider the Haskell letters among the best I have read, published or unpublished. They were a remarkable, devout, and well-educated family who endured unimaginable trials during the war of 1861-1865. The famous diarist Mary Chesnut knew them and wrote about them, and General Robert E. Lee chose Col. Alexander C. Haskell and his brother Lt. Col. John C. Haskell to surrender the cavalry and artillery of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. Most of the Haskell brothers served from the very beginnings of the war in Charleston, S.C. to the bitter end, and two gave their lives. Capt. William T. Haskell died at Gettysburg leading a battalion of sharpshooters, and Captain Charles T. Haskell, Jr. was shot down on Morris Island in the first enemy assault against Battery Wagner on July 10, 1863.
A Legion of Devils is a collection of compelling first-hand, eyewitness accounts of General William T. Sherman's little-known but brutal and destructive "march" through South Carolina.
The Immortals: A Story of Love and War, is Karen Stokes' most recent historical novel which releases December 2015. Based on true events, The Immortals is a saga of survival, devotion and courage that lays bare some of the darkest, most tragic episodes of America’s bloodiest war. In 1861, George W. Taylor must leave his beloved Charleston, and his beautiful fiancée Marguerite, to fight in his country's defense, and ultimately finds himself a prisoner of war--one of 600 captive Confederate officers subjected to such extraordinary hardships that they would become known as "The Immortal 600."
George Taylor's family face their own extraordinary and terrifying ordeal in Columbia, S.C., when General Sherman captures the city and unleashes his vindictive soldiers to pillage and burn.
Karen Stokes, an archivist at the South Carolina Historical Society who has worked with historical documents for nearly 20 years in beautiful Charleston, SC, has a passionate interest in the Confederate period of South Carolina history. Her non-fiction books open a window into the hearts and minds of men and women of that time through their letters, diaries, and other writings, in their own words.
Her full-length novel, Honor in the Dust, is the historically faithful story of Captain John Hutchinson, who returns to his plantation home in South Carolina in 1865 to find his world, and a way of life, in ashes. The war has ended, but he soon finds that for him, the worst of its horrors are not over.
Mrs. Stokes' first venture into historical fiction, Belles, A Carolina Love Story, is a romance novel based on the wartime letters of South Carolinians who took refuge in Flat Rock, NC. One of the characters in Belles is based on Captain Henry Wemyss Feilden, whose wartime letters have recently been published as A Confederate Englishman. This compelling collection of previously unpublished Civil War correspondence chronicles the story of a young British army officer who ran the blockade to offer his services to the Confederacy. Feilden served on the staff of Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard and other commanders in Charleston, and courted and married a young lady from a prominent South Carolina family.
Another non-fiction book, The Immortal 600, is the powerful story of 600 Confederate officers who endured extraordinarily harsh treatment as prisoners of war on Morris Island in Charleston harbor, and at Union-held Fort Pulaski near Savannah, Georgia.
