Home is where stories happen. Where lives, young and old, come together. Where lives are celebrated, changed forever, mourned, and remembered. Where birthdays are observed, Christmas presents opened, children conceived, marriages endured or shattered. Where the events of the day are witnessed, recapped, debated, and put in perspective. Where laughs and cries are shared.

If walls could talk, oh, the stories they could tell.

That’s the premise behind author Maura Satchell’s new novel, The Gray Lady of Long Branch, (coming Aug. 25 from Four Pillars Media, $14).

In this case, Satchell’s novel focuses on the lives of those coming and going at a grand Victorian beach house in New Jersey. Built in the 1910s, the house serves as the unique setting and narrator (yes, narrator!) of more than a dozen vignettes within its walls, taking readers on an emotional journey through time. The stories relive milestones in the lives of the DiStefano family who owns the house, friends, and visitors who rent the house for weekend getaways or vacations.

The stories are often warm and uplifting, and sometimes sad. Satchell excels at drawing readers into the lives of her characters and making you care about them. The characters, and their experiences, are all easily relatable to our own stories, our own personal triumphs, challenges, and tragedies.

“I was staying at the beach home of a prestigious songwriter, a little jewel of a place on the Florida Panhandle, she’d escape to and compose music and lyrics. I was there, along with my husband, my laptop and some serious rain and red tide that kept us more housebound than we’d planned,” Satchell says. “It hit me that that wonderful little place must have some stories, and maybe a soul.”

Even after a hard drive crash in which she lost everything she’d written, the beach house and its stories called to Satchell.

“I thought that was the end of it, but after five years, the characters kept beckoning and reminding me of their existence,” she says, and thus her newest novel was written again.

Satchell goes on to note that “a message emerged organically from this and I only discovered it near the very end of the writing, and that is the empowerment of women in the past several decades. It came out unbidden, but I’m very pleased how it’s revealed.”

And in case you can’t suspend your disbelief that a house can act as a narrator, stick with it. All will be made clear in the end.

“The other thing I hope readers take away from this is the possibility there is more to life and to this world than what can be seen by the naked eye,” Satchell says.

Satchell has always had a knack for telling stories in a compassionate way and for letting the passions of her characters define them, and that skill is evident here. Prior to crafting fictional stories as a novelist, she chronicled real-life stories as a reporter for The Tennessean in Nashville and other area newspapers. She holds a bachelor’s degree in mass communications from Middle Tennessee State University.

The author is also a talented artist; one of her paintings graces the cover of the book.

The Gray Lady of Long Branch is due to be released Aug. 25 and will be available at the publisher’s website – www.fourpillarsmediagroup.com – in both paperback and digital formats. It will also be available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, ITunes and other online retailers, and by request at bookstores and libraries everywhere.  Four Pillars is offering a 30 percent advance discount for books purchased before the release date at their website using the code GL30Advance. Pre-purchased books will ship before Aug. 25.

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Note to readers: Maura and I were co-workers in our other lives as newspaper journalists for several years. I’ve tried to be objective in my review of her book. It’s not my usual genre, but stories well-told transcend artificial boundaries. This is one of those.

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