Sweet Sorghum Windter PB

“An exquisite plunge into the true story of one close-knit Georgia family abiding the Great Depression.”

If you loved Little Women you’ll be delighted with Sweet Sorghum Winter

Like many of us, author Melanie Hill has great family stories to tell. But unlike most people, Hill decided to write this compelling historical novel about hers. Her grandmother, Martha Ann Sutton, and her mother, Audrey Sutton, are the two principal protagonists of this story about one troubled family at a time of great adversity.

The author writes: “Martha Ann looked at what remained, weighed her strength, and judged it to be more than enough.”

The narrative of Sweet Sorghum Winter centers around the enduring relationships within the Sutton family. The action takes place in the record-cold winter of 1939 in a small rural town in Georgia, where Martha Ann has to deal with her alcoholic husband’s grave illness, the blossoming towards adulthood of their three children, and an onerous family debt stemming from the failure of the bank her father founded and she dissolved.

Across the thread of that single winter’s story, Hill has artfully woven an epic tale of boom times and busts, faith and failure, coming of age, promises kept and broken, faint hope, foul disappointment — all the bitter and the sweet of one strong woman’s unyielding imperative to prevail with the help of God.

“When something bad is done to you, you don’t simply decide once that you will not be bitter. It’s a decision you have to make time and time again, a continual reaffirmation.” Character of Martha Ann Sutton
Sweet Sorghum Winter

The Sutton family has hit hard times by the winter of 1939. From once running the only bank in Ellenton, Georgia, now dissolved and shuttered, Martha Ann Sutton is now faced with her alcoholic husband’s declining health, raising three precocious children, paying off an onerous debt resulting from the bank’s failure, scratching enough food to keep her family fed from a farm with two tenant sharecroppers, abiding always in the grace of her Baptist faith, and protecting a family legacy she holds to be precious.

This amazing debut novel by Melanie Hill, drawn from passed-down family legend, public records, and personal memories, is a tour de force of spellbinding storytelling: remembrance and imagination, lyrical dialogue, and intriguing characters in unfolding relationships. So come meet Martha Ann and Jimmy, Baker, Audrey, Franklin, Bird Dog, Prissy the cow, the Seven Dwarfs, Mama 'Bo, the aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, the fellow congregants at Buck Creek Baptist Church, and — of course — the bad guys.

Paperback available now, hard cover in March 2025.