Shadows on the Heart

She’s driving to pick up a future she never wanted. When she gets there, it’s worse than she feared.

When her brother dies suddenly and she’s named legal guardian to three children she’s never met, Lita Bravo, a tattooed, thirty-two-year-old amateur mixed martial arts fighter, leaves her high desert home in Arizona to drive to California, a place from which she ran away years ago. Upon her arrival, she finds not only three grieving children but her estranged mother who has dementia and nowhere else to go.

For Jade McGovern, a serious twelve-year-old who’s had the same friends since kindergarten, life becomes unhinged when her parents die. Forced to move to a new state to live with a foul-mouthed, incompetent aunt, Jade decides to do anything she can to get back to California.

Evie Long, whose life, loves and libations have always come first, really wants a drink. She doesn’t recognize the daughter who ran away nearly twenty years ago and wonders when she’ll find her missing daughter.

As Evie falls deeper into her memories and Jade takes steps down a troublesome path, Lita struggles to parent and cope with a mother she thought she’d never see again. SHADOWS ON THE HEART, told from the perspective of three unique narrators, explores the bonds of family and friendship and the rippling impact of loss, grief and addiction across generations.

Elizabeth Oldham has been writing her entire life. She has lived and worked all over the world but now resides in the Kootenay region of British Columbia with her husband, twenty chickens and a crazed rescue dog. She has two grown children and spends her time exploring the mountains and curling. Tail of Humanity, her first novel, was published in 2023. The novel was a finalist for the 2023 Best Book Awards and shortlisted for the 2024 Whistler Independent Book Award. Shadows on the Heart is her second novel.