I
Theme One
Love & Longing
A love that grows quietly in the gold hour, and the courage it takes to hold on to something that might not last.
The Novel
My Sweet
Elisabeth
A Southern novel of love, memory and the secrets a family keeps beneath the moss-hung oaks.
Now on Amazon
The Story
Beneath the
Old Oaks
Under moss-hung live oaks, at the edge of an old Southern estate, two lives meet in the gold hour between day and dark.
My Sweet Elisabeth is a novel of love, memory and the ties that hold people to a place. As one long Southern summer unfolds, old loyalties are tested, family secrets stir beneath the surface and a single choice begins to echo through the years.
It is a story to read slowly, the way you sit on a porch and watch the light change: tender, haunting and full of the quiet places where the past still lives.
Author
Richard E. Peek Jr.
Genre
Southern Fiction
Setting
The American South
Formats
Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle
Inside the Novel
The Heart of
the Story
Three threads are woven through every chapter, the kind of themes readers find themselves talking about long after the last page.
II
Theme Two
Family & Secrets
Inherited loyalties, unspoken history and the promises one generation leaves for the next to keep or to break.
III
Theme Three
Memory & Place
An old estate, a stand of live oaks and a slow river: places that remember everything, long after the people have moved on.
For Book Clubs
Read it
Together
My Sweet Elisabeth was made for long conversations. Here are a few questions to get your group talking:
- Which character changed the most, and what changed them?
- How does the Southern setting shape the choices people make?
- What role do family loyalty and long-kept secrets play?
- Which scene stayed with you after you closed the book?