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There Is A River: a novel
“Your life took a detour down the river... See where it goes.”
—Charlie Bradford
It’s 1978, and songs from the movie Saturday Night Fever top the record charts. U.S. President Jimmy Carter brokers a landmark peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. And a New York state health emergency becomes international news when the neighborhood called Love Canal is found to be sitting on a toxic waste dump.
What seems like a world away, Janie Smith struggles as a waitress and single mother, living near the beautiful Ashepoo River in Green Pond, South Carolina. Janie finds a measure of peace on the marsh behind her home. An elderly neighbor, Charlie Bradford, frequently fishes across the narrow channel and the two strike up an unlikely friendship.
When Janie notices a strange smell on the wind and in the water outside her home, she wonders whether it may be tied to the electronics company just up the river. At first, no one else seems to share her concern. After all, Shelton Manufacturing is the area’s biggest employer.
Janie suspects that something is wrong with the river. It could affect her young daughter, her neighbors, and the community she calls home. I’m just a waitress, she thinks. A single mom. And yet Janie can’t let it go. With advice from Charlie, she decides to act. Soon, long-held secrets are uncovered and there are serious wrongs to be righted.
—Charlie Bradford
It’s 1978, and songs from the movie Saturday Night Fever top the record charts. U.S. President Jimmy Carter brokers a landmark peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. And a New York state health emergency becomes international news when the neighborhood called Love Canal is found to be sitting on a toxic waste dump.
What seems like a world away, Janie Smith struggles as a waitress and single mother, living near the beautiful Ashepoo River in Green Pond, South Carolina. Janie finds a measure of peace on the marsh behind her home. An elderly neighbor, Charlie Bradford, frequently fishes across the narrow channel and the two strike up an unlikely friendship.
When Janie notices a strange smell on the wind and in the water outside her home, she wonders whether it may be tied to the electronics company just up the river. At first, no one else seems to share her concern. After all, Shelton Manufacturing is the area’s biggest employer.
Janie suspects that something is wrong with the river. It could affect her young daughter, her neighbors, and the community she calls home. I’m just a waitress, she thinks. A single mom. And yet Janie can’t let it go. With advice from Charlie, she decides to act. Soon, long-held secrets are uncovered and there are serious wrongs to be righted.
333 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 14, 2025
About the author
Shelley Burchfield
7 books60 followersA southerner by birth, Shelley Burchfield's love of history and all things southern is evident in her debut novel, THE EARTH REMAINS, winner of the 2023 Readers Favorite Book Awards Gold Medal in Christian Historical Fiction and named a finalist in the 2023 American Fiction Awards.
A former teacher, Burchfield enjoys writing "what-if" southern fiction that flips notorious events upside down. She enjoys mountain hikes, hot coffee, and stacks of books yet to be read on a bedside table. She lives in the beautiful mountains of north Georgia with her husband and a menagerie of animals and pulls inspiration from the majestic Blue Ridge Mountains beyond her windows.
Her second historical fiction novel, CLIMBING TO THE SUN, was published in October 2023, and recently won the Bronze Medal in the 2024 Readers' Favorite International Book Awards contest. Set in the autumn of 1928. Herbalist and healer Callie Beecham owns a shop in tiny Pickens, South Carolina, and makes a living treating people with plant-based medicines and therapies. When a young man urgently knocks on her door one morning, Callie finds her world turned upside down. He begs Callie to come to the freed-slave settlement of Liberia, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to save his wife, struggling in childbirth. On the back of a mule, Callie follows the man to Liberia and discovers a world previously unknown to her, and a desire to help the people there. Her desire to help the residents of Liberia quickly angers the wrong people in town—important people who will stop at nothing to see her gone for good.
A former teacher, Burchfield enjoys writing "what-if" southern fiction that flips notorious events upside down. She enjoys mountain hikes, hot coffee, and stacks of books yet to be read on a bedside table. She lives in the beautiful mountains of north Georgia with her husband and a menagerie of animals and pulls inspiration from the majestic Blue Ridge Mountains beyond her windows.
Her second historical fiction novel, CLIMBING TO THE SUN, was published in October 2023, and recently won the Bronze Medal in the 2024 Readers' Favorite International Book Awards contest. Set in the autumn of 1928. Herbalist and healer Callie Beecham owns a shop in tiny Pickens, South Carolina, and makes a living treating people with plant-based medicines and therapies. When a young man urgently knocks on her door one morning, Callie finds her world turned upside down. He begs Callie to come to the freed-slave settlement of Liberia, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to save his wife, struggling in childbirth. On the back of a mule, Callie follows the man to Liberia and discovers a world previously unknown to her, and a desire to help the people there. Her desire to help the residents of Liberia quickly angers the wrong people in town—important people who will stop at nothing to see her gone for good.
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