Winds of the South (Signed Copy)

Winds of the South is a novel set in pre-civil war Georgia. It is the story of Zimri Rhodes, a transplanted Connecticut Yankee who starts a newspaper in a frontier settlement and marries a young Southern girl who is the daughter of a wealthy planter. She brings as part of her dowry four slaves, who Zimri, for financial reasons, sells at auction, and though he stipulates that the family is not to be broken up, a trader re-sells them separately afterwards. Zimri is remorseful, but knows not what to do, thinking that he will never see these slaves again. He tries to forget about it as he returns to his home in Connecticut to visit family and friends. While there, he meets a most extraordinary woman, an actress from New York who is also involved in the abolitionist movement, though to what extent remains a mystery. Shortly after he returns to Georgia, his young wife delivers their second and third children, fraternal twins. Everything seems to have returned to normal, his newspaper is flourishing, and the future seems bright. But one day the actress appears, makes a proposal that transforms both the town and her relationship with Zimri, and nothing is ever again the same.

Ben Walker is the author of Sentimental Music, a novel set in contemporary Florida, published in 1998. He is also a talented playwright, having penned The King's Dice, an absurdist musing on the last days of Alexander the Great, and Blood Relations, a black comedy of race, sex, and dashed dreams that was a winner of the 1997 South Carolina Playwrights' Conference Competition in Beaufort, S.C. Ben is a graduate of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, as well as San Francisco State University, where he received an M.A. degree in Creative Writing. He currently lives and writes in Jacksonville, Florida.