Bones: A Novel

by Audrey Taylor Gonzalez

A follow-up to South of Everything that also serves as a standalone novel, Bones traces the story of Missy, a young woman from a plantation-owning family in the Deep South. When Missy is violently attacked as a teenager, she is sent to a boarding school and her beloved Mr. Washington is wrongfully imprisoned. Baffled by the pervasive racism of her environment, Missy allows her fierce love for Mr. Washington to be her guiding light on her mission to be reunited with him.

When Missy meets Chief Bakari, a Mbulu tribal chief, she is tasked with returning Old Thomas’s bones to the mystical lolololo tree. Missy readily accepts, as Old Thomas was Missy’s protector, and he had introduced her to the magical, healing tree.

Missy’s quest brings her to Tanganyika, where she feels an immediate kinship with the people of Africa. But tensions are mounting, and Missy’s journey will reach a fever pitch when a brutal act threatens her existence.

A work of magical realism and folklore, Bones is an immersive, at times macabre love story that spans continents gripped by racism and upheaval.

222 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 17, 2022

About the author

Reverend Audrey Taylor Gonzalez was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1939. In the span of her long career, she’s been a journalist, TV host, art gallery owner, racehorse breeder, mountain climber, world traveler, breast cancer survivor, and the first woman to be ordained to holy orders in the Southern Cone of South America at Uruguay’s Holy Trinity Cathedral in Montevideo. She’s a philanthropist, and mother and grandmother to her own children as well as many people in need that have crossed her path over the years. As a deacon at Calvary Episcopal Church in Memphis, Audrey received the prestigious Juvenile Court Judges Award for Outstanding Service in 2012 and 2014 and she was selected by the governor of Tennessee as a Commissioner on TCCY (Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth). She is the author of the fictional memoir The Lolololo Tree and two collections of writings and homilies, Sermons and Such and The Shady Place, and two collections of poetry – Waiting for Rain, and Hurgadores de la Vida. Her debut novel, South of Everything, is a magical tale, set in the South in the 40s-50s, and will be published by She Writes Press in the fall of 2015.