Secrets - A Novel - Book 1. Secrets, #1

Secrets: A Novel is Book One in Jo Ann Lordahl's Secrets Series, a raw, introspective work of literary women's fiction about memory, survival, and the long reach of the past. Antonia Martin grew up on a hardscrabble Southern farm where fire was both danger and refuge: the family fireplace, a near-fatal blaze she set as a child, and the harsh discipline of a mother who found a strange satisfaction in punishing her.
Decades later, grown and living in Florida and Louisiana, Antonia is undone by grief for Catlin, a brilliant, complicated literary mentor and lover modeled loosely on a real giant of American letters. His death forces her back into the journals she has kept for years, where childhood trauma, sexual longing, and an unflinching reckoning with mortality all surface at once. Caught between men who want to possess her, the ghost of the man who understood her best, and the child she once was, Antonia writes her way toward a fragile, hard-won peace.
Secrets moves between vivid childhood flashback and present-day reflection, using journal entries, dreams, and unguarded inner monologue to explore what it costs a woman to finally stop running from her own history. This is not a tidy redemption story. It is a frank, sometimes uncomfortable, deeply human account of abuse, desire, loss, and the slow work of self-reclamation, told in the voice of a woman determined to understand herself on her own terms.
Followed by Wolf World, Book Two in the Secrets Series.