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When I was a girl, growing up as an American expatriate in such places as Venezuela and London, England, I had the rare opportunity to see the world and to view my own country as our global neighbors do. 

But no matter how far we traveled, every summer I would beg to be sent to my grandmother's house in Indianola, Mississippi.  It's a small town where my brothers used to joke that if you were driving through and blinked, you'd miss it.  They claimed that the 'Welcome to Indianola' sign had the words ‘turn your clock back twenty years' written at the bottom.

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When people ask me what I write, I tell them that I write ‘southern women's fiction'.  To clarify, I usually follow that with the (hopefully) more clear ‘grit lit.'  Although that frequently elicits a grin or two, it rarely seems to explain what it is that I try to create on the pages of my novels.

I stick with the adage of ‘write what I know' and I know the south.  Although I've only lived in the south for less than half of my years, I come from a long line of southerners.  My father's family has lived in the south since before the American Revolution and both of my parents were born and raised in Mississippi-my father on the gulf coast and my mother in the Delta.  I have relatives still living there who most people from other parts of the country would need a translator to understand.  But when I hear them speak, I simply feel as if I have found home.

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Karen White is our guest blogger during the week of March 30th. If you have any questions for Karen White, add a comment to any of her posts.

Here is more information on The Lost Hours.

The award-winning author of The Memory of Water delivers a gripping tale of family, fate, and forgiveness.

When Piper Mills was twelve, she helped her grandfather bury a box that belonged to her grandmother in the backyard. For twelve years, it remained untouched.

Now a near fatal riding accident has shattered Piper's dreams of Olympic glory. After her grandfather's death, she inherits the house and all its secrets, including a key to a room that doesn't exist-or does it? And after her grandmother is sent away to a nursing home, she remembers the box buried in the backyard. In it are torn pages from a scrapbook, a charm necklace-and a newspaper article from 1929 about the body of an infant found floating in the Savannah River. The necklace's charms tell the story of three friends during the 1920s- each charm added during the three months each friend had the necklace and recorded her life in the scrapbook. Piper always dismissed her grandmother as not having had a story to tell. And now, too late, Piper finds she might have been wrong.