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Robert Morgan's new novel “The Road From Gap Creek” continues the story of the Richards family, the North Carolina clan in his 1999 best-seller "Gap Creek" - and of the Powell family, from three more of his historical novels.

Robert Morgan returns to his native Appalachian territory in North Carolina and the resilient Richards family in “The Road From Gap Creek” (Algonquin Books), the sequel to his 1999 best-selling novel “Gap Creek.”

Like its predecessor, the new novel is historical fiction rooted in a place – the Blue Ridge Mountains – and people that Morgan knows well. “Gap Creek” followed Hank and Julie Harmon Richards through love and marriage and hardscrabble times, enduring adversity and chaos at the turn of the last century.

Their daughter, Annie Richards Powell, narrates the sequel, beginning by recounting the worst day in her family’s life and the journey they took long ago from Gap Creek to Green River, N.C. She and her siblings come of age there and find their own way, as Morgan follows them through the Great Depression and World War II.

“From the day ‘Gap Creek’ was published, I began to get letters and emails from people asking for a sequel,” Morgan said from Raleigh, N.C., a stop on his book tour on days off from teaching the MFA poetry seminar this fall. “This was telling me that the story seemed not complete somehow.”

He was writing “This Rock” at the time, and then set to work on other projects as he mulled the sequel.

 

“What was holding me up was, I assumed that Julie, who narrated ‘Gap Creek,’ would narrate the sequel,” he said. “I realized she had told her story, and that her daughter Annie would have to narrate. I wrote the first draft in four months. It all came rather quickly.”

By continuing the story of the Powell family as well, Morgan says this book is also a sequel to “This Rock,” “The Truest Pleasure” and the novella “The Mountains Won’t Remember Us.”

The Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell, Morgan was born in 1944 in Hendersonville, N.C. Raised on a farm on land settled by his great-great-grandfather, he grew up hearing the stories of his family and neighbors. He has published poetry and fiction since 1965 and began teaching at Cornell in 1971.

Following the success of “Gap Creek,” selected by Oprah Winfrey for Oprah’s Book Club, Morgan continued to earn acclaim for his prose, verse and nonfiction.

He is the author of six novels, more than a dozen books of poetry, three short-story collections, a volume of essays and interviews, and nonfiction works including “Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion” (2011) and “Boone: A Biography” (2007), a national bestseller.

His honors include the 2008 Thomas Wolfe Prize from the University of North Carolina (he shares a birthday – Oct. 3 – as well as a regional literary kinship with Wolfe); a 2007 Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature; induction into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2010; Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships; the James B. Hanes Poetry Prize, and the University of South Carolina Union’s 2013 William “Singing Billy” Walker Award for Lifetime Achievement in Southern Letters, awarded in March.

Morgan finishes his book tour this month and will address the Friends of the Tompkins County Public Library at their annual meeting in November.