From the author of the international bestseller The Atomic City Girls, Janet Beard’s The Ballad of Laurel Springs is a provocative new novel about eight generations of women in one East Tennessee family, and how they pass songs down through the years, along with a legacy of secrets, violence, and love.

Set against a soundtrack of traditional ballads steeped in gospel and blues, these women’s lives are both reflected in and reclaimed by a rich inheritance of folk music. Beard’s flinty, finely-observed novel imagines the complicated, compelling stories behind timeless songs that have taken on a near-mythical life of their own.

In the novel, ten-year-old Grace is in search of a subject for her fifth-grade history project when she learns that her four times-great grandfather once stabbed his lover to death. His grisly act was memorialized in a murder ballad, her aunt tells her, so it must be true. But the lessons of that revelation—to be careful of men and desire—are not just Grace’s to learn. Her family’s tangled past is part of a dark legacy in which the lives of generations of women are affected by the violence immortalized in folk songs like “Knoxville Girl” and “Pretty Polly” reminding them to always know their place—or risk the wages of sin.