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Forthcoming · Gulf Coast Alabama, 1955

Unburdened by Midnight

A Southern Gothic novel by Samantha Bebb. Sand roads, pecan shade, and a county that already knows everyone’s story — except the man who has just arrived.

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A sandy shell road tunneled by live oaks and Spanish moss, with a distant clapboard farmhouse in late Gulf light.
A live oak in Spanish moss at night, one farmhouse window lit gold behind it.
The hour the title keeps.

The novel

A stranger on a shore that keeps its own counsel.

In the summer of 1955, along the roads between longleaf pine and tidewater, Reza arrives from Iran. The porches go quiet when they need to. The county has a version of itself it means to keep.

Unburdened by Midnight is about what a newcomer is allowed to see, and about love, loyalty, and law in a place that had already decided who belonged.

The book, more closely

What it holds

  1. 01

    Arrival

    Reza comes from Iran into a county that has already sorted its people. The novel stays with what a stranger is permitted to notice.

  2. 02

    The color line

    1955 is not a backdrop. Neighbors who are not allowed to be neighbors live inside a law that called that impossible.

  3. 03

    After dark

    Between the courthouse and the sandy road is a justice the county will not name in daylight. Midnight keeps its own hours.

A wooden shrimp boat at a pier on Mobile Bay at dawn, marsh grass in rose light.
Mobile Bay at first light — working water, not a postcard. The coast the novel remembers

The author

Samantha Bebb

A debut novelist. Before the book, twenty years as an officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. She writes now from a homestead in western Montana, at a distance from the coast this story will not leave alone.

About Samantha
An empty screened porch with a cane rocking chair and a jar of tea, fig leaves against the screen.

The list

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