The Search for Family (3 Minutes with Dr. Rachel Callaghan)

My guest this week on 3 Minutes with the Author is Dr. Rachel Callaghan, physician turned novelist and award-winning essayist. She writes from experience as a survivor of stage IV lymphoma about traumatic circumstances and the emotional and psychological damage they cause. Following a stem cell transplant and a decade of profound fatigue which left her mourning the loss of patients she loved as friends, Dr. Callaghan turned to writing about people and making them come alive on the page. Her firm belief in recovery and starting over imbues her debut novel UNDER WATER , a dual timeline exploration of people renovating not only a home, but relationships and marriages in their search for family.

Watch the entire episode HERE.

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About UNDER WATER

Submerged beneath layers of history lies a long-ago buried secret.

During the pandemic lockdown, Iris Pearl impulsively relocates her dulling marriage across the country in a bid to revive it. But renovating their Prerevolutionary Pennsylvania homestead gives Iris more than she bargained for when she makes a gruesome discovery, one that hurtles her and Benny’s haunted past to the present.

Iris is desperately consumed by the desire to know what happened on her property over a century and a half earlier. Her search leads her to Irish immigrant Aoife Sprigett, the wife of Union soldier William. The further she digs into the mystery of Aoife’s fate, the deeper she reaches into her own secret history.

While William serves in the Civil War, Aoife struggles to uphold her vow to maintain their livelihood, their farm, during his absence. Aoife’s only companion is their hired help, Thomas Walker, a freeborn black laborer. Aoife and Thomas develop a warm friendship as they toil side by side in the fields. Together, Aoife and Thomas sow deep seeds that bear deep-rooted consequences, which are now coming to light.

Will unearthing the truth behind Aoife’s tragic past, which so closely parallels Iris’s own, free her and Benny from their marriage’s haunted history, or will revisiting that dark time destroy it?