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The Deliverance of Barker McRae: A Novel

The Deliverance of Barker McRae: A Novel
By author: Stacia Pelletier
Product Code: HH1058
ISBN: 9780881469721
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It's a wintry April 1833 in Watkinsville, Georgia. Fourteen-year-old Barker McRae is stuck living with her odious uncle, militia captain Wiley Wood, as she waits for her father, a Methodist circuit rider, to return. Instead, a stranger arrives. Matthew Higgenbotham, a land lottery messenger who dreams of leaving Georgia, shows up at Wiley's farm with unexpected news: Barker has won forty acres in the latest state lottery. His announcement sets in motion an act of unimaginable violence, a harrowing escape, and a cat-and-mouse chase across frontier Georgia during America's first gold rush and the illegal seizure of Cherokee lands. With Higgenbotham as her reluctant ally, Barker's mission is clear: escape her uncle and reunite with her father. Or should she free herself from them both? And what about the troubled aunt she has left behind? Set against the backdrop of the Georgia Gold Rush, alongside the era of Methodist circuit riders and early nineteenth-century evangelists, THE DELIVERANCE OF BARKER MCRAE weaves fiction and meticulously researched history to introduce readers to two travelers, thrown together by luck and duty, on an adventure neither of them wanted. This is a tale about trespass, frontier religion, fathers and daughters, and friendships between unlikely companions. It's also about what it means to make a moral choice in a profoundly immoral historical moment.
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Reviews

Review by: Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of THE MANY DAUGHTERS OF AFONG MOY - June 2, 2025
"Inspired by real historical figures, this sweeping, masterfully crafted saga unveils the Cherokee Land Lottery, one of the most unsettling and overlooked chapters in American history. With incredible detail and unflinching honesty, this novel exemplifies the very best of historical fiction, illuminating the past with heart, depth, and undeniable power. I'm in awe."
Review by: Julia Franks, author of award-winning novels THE SAY SO and OVER THE PLAIN HOUSES - June 2, 2025
"THE DELIVERANCE OF BARKER MCRAE is a wild and riveting ride through the underside of Georgia's nineteenth century Gold Rush and land lotteries. Pelletier has meticulously researched a lawless and violent corner of our state's past and brought it to intense life. Her characters jump off the page, and the plot does what the best historical fiction should: illuminate and vivify chapters of history that our schoolbooks and teachers left out. I felt smarter after reading it. Pelletier's novel is one of the most entertaining and edifying novels on Georgia's history I've read in years."
Review by: Jonathan Rabb, author of six novels, including the Berlin Trilogy and AMONG THE LIVING - June 2, 2025
"Few books startle you on almost every page--the elegance of the prose, the deep and human insights--and Stacia Pelletier's beautiful THE DELIVERANCE OF BARKER MCRAE is one such book. These characters are so richly drawn, and the ease of the narrative so compelling, that it was difficult to know where fiction and history parted, the mark of what is always best in historical fiction. Not surprisingly, I was put in mind of NEWS OF THE WORLD. Pelletier now joins Paulette Jiles as one of the finest and most distinct voices of America’s troubled past."
Review by: Daren Wang, author of THE HIDDEN LIGHT OF NORTHERN FIRES - June 2, 2025
"The ghosts of Cormac McCarthy's Judge, Charles Frazier's Inman, and Flannery O'Connor's Hazel Motes all haunt the nineteenth-century Georgia wilds of this devastating novel. But even as the title echoes that landmark by James Dickey, THE DELIVERANCE OF BARKER MCRAE stands on its own as a beautiful and singular accomplishment. Read it and weep."

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