In Reaching Back, award-winning author Nea Anna Simone introduces Mignon Samuels and begins a powerful multigenerational saga that explores legacy, identity, and the enduring strength of Black womanhood. Through the discovery of an aging leather-bound journal, Mignon is drawn into the hidden lives of four generations of women whose stories have shaped her family-and her own understanding of self.
As Mignon reads the journal, she uncovers narratives of love, survival, sacrifice, and silence passed down from her great-grandmother to her mother. These intimate accounts reveal the unspoken choices and compromises women made in order to endure, often at the cost of their own desires. What begins as an exploration of family history becomes a mirror, reflecting the patterns that have quietly shaped Mignon's life.
At the same time, Mignon is confronting the unraveling of her marriage and the collapse of the life she believed she was meant to live. Caught between inherited expectations and a growing need for truth, she must decide whether to continue repeating generational cycles or risk redefining herself on her own terms. The voices of the women who came before her challenge her to confront what has been buried and to consider what healing truly requires.
Reaching Back is an emotionally rich, fast-paced novel about memory, identity, and transformation. Nea Anna Simone's prose is lyrical, honest, and deeply human, offering a nuanced exploration of how personal choices are shaped by generational history. As the opening novel in the Mignon Samuels Trilogy, Reaching Back lays the foundation for a story that continues in Reborn and concludes in The Substance of Things, tracing one woman's journey toward self-definition across the weight of inherited legacy.
Long before her name became synonymous with great storytelling, Nea worked 60-70 hours a week building a marketing firm to support her three daughters as a single parent. Nea would squeeze in time before going to the office to work on her hobby--writing her first novel.
A voracious reader, Nea had often privately considered writing but never took the first step until the day she received a call from her friend Dana Nelson. Dana called to tell Nea, that when she had been in prayer, God had sent a message through her, for Nea. The message was simply "She should write". Realizing the message had to be from God, Nea was inspired to start writing the novel Reaching Back. That night she sat at her computer and wrote the first thirty five pages exploring what would have happened if .... Reaching Back was acquired by BET Books, who published it in 2002 where it became their first book reviewed as "literary" fiction. The book was reprinted over 14 times in the first printing. In 2013 the Unabridged version of Reaching Back was re-released under the Gravel Road Imprint.
Following on the heels of Reaching Back's success, Simone wrote ReBorn the sequel which skyrocketed to become a New York Times bestseller in 2007. ReBorn was also released under the Gravel Road Imprint. In 2008, Simone took a hiatus from writing to concentrate on raising her children and collaborate with her partners to form Equal Hue Productions and adapt Reaching Back into a made for television mini-series to be aired in four parts. She returned to writing in 2012 to pen the long awaited conclusion to the trilogy, "The Substance of Things", taken from Hebrews 11:1. "Now Faith is the Substance of Things Hoped For and the Evidence of Things not seen," Simone feels it is the obvious conclusion to the trilogy based on a writing career that was launched and sustained by faith.
Now Simone is busy at work on her fourth novel, "A Memory of Love".
