Mary Driver-Thiel
Three women, one secret,
and the power of family ties
Sylvia has grown up a lonely only child in a world of privilege, but she discovers a deep secret: her socially prominent mother once had another child who was given up for adoption years before Sylvia was born.​
Callie has worked hard and ​learned to stand on her own two feet, rarely allowing herself to think about the “what-ifs” and “whys” of being given away at birth.​
Anne, their mother, has closed the door on her past and on her feelings, certain no one will ever know her secret.​ When Sylvia decides to go in search of Callie, the dramatic and unexpected consequences change the lives of all three women forever.
"An inviting page-turner about turning the page on the past."
Twelve thousand mornings, twelve thousand chances for a new start...
In this sequel to The World Undone, Anne Bennett is left widowed and penniless after her husband's firm is involved in financial fraud. In shock and forced to leave her home, Anne has never felt so alone and vulnerable.
Protecting a secret from her youth has left her with few friends and has estranged her from her daughters, Sylvia and Callie, who live near one another in Michigan. After exhausting the limited prospects open to her, Anne has no choice but to accept Sylvia's invitation—or is it a challenge?—to stay with her.
With guilt, grief, and the ghost of tragedy shadowing her every step, Anne must come to terms with her past in order to navigate her future.
"A satisfying follow-up that will leave readers clamoring for more."
Works in Progress
Shadewood
In this modern-era Gothic novel, Romance writer Evie meets and marries Hugh in a whirlwind romance that surpasses the plot in any of her stories, but when they return to his ancestral home, Shadewood, her life is not at all as she imagined.
Crescent Drive
A mostly true memoir of growing up in the 1960s on a small street amongst colorful neighbors and houses full of secrets, jealousies, hidden fortunes, and a couple of shrunken heads.
Jumble Cake
The story of two very different women—one white and privileged, one Black and stalwart—whose shared secret binds them together through all the turbulence of social expectations and dramas of life over the course of sixty years.