That Which Binds Us

2025 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Finalist (Historical Fiction)

In the 1860s, on Virginia’s Appalachian frontier, the fates of five people are forever linked as they navigate love, loss, and the cost of buried secrets amid the strife and turmoil of an unimaginable civil war.

In 1854, on the lawless western edge of Virginia, Elizabeth Young stands among the throngs and watches as her beloved uncle is hanged for murder. She can tell that there is more to this spectacle than meets the eye, and she vows then and there she’ll discover the truth then leave these godforsaken mountains. She’ll go where the land is flat, where life is in the open, where dreams have room to roam.

But fate has another idea. Three strangers with dreams and secrets of their own come into her life: Patrick Hagan, Irish Catholic immigrant and a bright young attorney with a dogged determination to do good and make good; Mary Lenore Kitchens, the sophisticated teacher who’s come to Virginia’s hinterlands, for who knows why; handsome Ben Grubb, local boy, banjo prodigy, a mischievous sort who wants only to play. Soon their lives become inextricably linked, along with that of Red Hopkins, an old friend to Elizabeth’s Papa, and in marches the Civil War.

Punctuated by class and the realities of a devastating conflict, That Which Binds Us is a broad work of historical fiction that celebrates our best and explores our worst, that serves to remind us that across continents and cultures and generations, love holds the greatest power of all.

Cathy Rigg was born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains of Southwest Virginia where her people, on her mother’s side, go back generations. She moved to South Carolina after college and founded the brand marketing firm, Riggs Partners. Rigg’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Litmosphere: Journal of Charlotte Lit, Still: the Journal, Clinch Mountain Review, and other publications. She and her husband divide their time between Columbia, SC, and Burnsville, NC, where they stare at the view and obsess over the bears on a ridge high above Asheville.