Terah Shelton Harris Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Terah Shelton Harris is a literary fiction author, freelance writer, and librarian best known for upmarket works with bittersweet endings.

As a freelance writer, her novels have been frequently featured in trade magazines such as Minority Nurse, Catapult, Backpacker, Women’s Health, Every Day with Rachael Ray, and Women’s Health.

Shelton Harris had been working as a librarian for more than one and a half decades. As a librarian, she has been charged with coordinating all aspects of digital and print adult collection development.

These aspects usually include the acquisition, processing, withdrawal, cataloging, circulation, and ensuring the communications network and technology’s future and present optimal functioning and operation.
She has also received and allocated more than half a million dollars in federal, state, and local grants. One of her proudest achievements is when she commissioned the Westgate Park Wi-Fi-in-the-Park project that offers free wifi to hundreds of people.
Originally from Illinois, she currently lives with Jamel her husband in Alabama. Terah is a huge travel enthusiast and has been to all six continents and has visited more than 40 countries.

She has been on a quest in St. Louis to find Wiliam Clark’s grave, walked the Bokeo Nature Reserve, and watched the sun rise on both coasts of the Americas.

Shelton Harris has said that “One Summer in Savannah” was inspired by an incident that happened in 2015. The incident that triggered this was the Charleston South Carolina Emmanuel African Methodist Church Shooting.
Following the tragic event, even before people had put their loved ones to rest, relatives and survivors of the slain had walked into a courtroom and said they forgave the killer.

It was at that moment that Terah Harris came to the realization that she knew very little about forgiveness. She made the decision to begin exploring forgiveness, as she set out to pen a novel to challenge readers on what forgiveness truly means.
Even though she has found the path toward writing her novel, she stumbled into the story she needed to tell when she learned that someone close to her had been sexually assaulted and became pregnant from the ordeal.
This is not a theme that has been explored much in fiction and she decided to approach it with much consideration and care.

For Harris, it was all about writing a work that would speak to millions who faced such circumstances with dignity and bravery.

Terah Shelton Harris began penning her novel in February 2020 and wrote most of it during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

She had been on a trip with her best friends around the world when she made the decision to begin writing.

Prior to that, she had been researching, drafting, and plotting ad nauseam probably because she was terrified of starting. On the trip, they headed to Paris and somehow she felt an urge just to sit down and get some words on the page.
By March the library she was then working had been shut down and it would not open for at least three months, giving her all the time to write.

She was done writing by the end of November and spent much of December editing and typing, as she usually writes her manuscripts in long hand. After many rewrites and edits, she finally published One Summer in Savannah in 2023.

“One Summer in Savannah” by Terah Shelton Haris is the story of a woman named Sara. She was sexually assaulted in her teens and the result was a beautiful daughter.
She had been away for nearly a decade and is back home to see her father who has a serious health complication.

Sara had run away from home since Daniel the young man who had raped her was from a very wealthy and powerful family. While the perpetrator was in prison, she feared that his family would make an attempt at getting custody.
But once she lands in town, she finds that her father has become good friends with Jacon, the twin brother to Daniel, who had testified against his brother and helped convict him.
For his actions, he is estranged from his family. But even though he is friends with Sara’s father, he does not know that Sara has a child from the rape.

When Jacob ultimately meets Alana, Sara makes him promise to never tell his family of her secret in exchange for letting him get to know the kid.

In the meantime, Jacob and Sara are getting drawn to each other despite him being the twin of the man who had brutally assaulted her.

It is a compelling debut with touching emotion that interrogates questions of unconditional love, redemption, and family, as two people discover what forgiveness is all about.

Terah Shelton Harris’ novel “Long After We Are Gone” is an emotional and explosive story of four siblings fighting their own personal battles.

At the opening of the novel, they are back home following the death of their father so that they can ensure their family home will not be sold for some dubious debts.
The last thing the deceased had said to Solomon one of his sons was to never let the white man take their house.

When he dies, all four siblings descend on their North Carolina property hoping to save their 200-acre ancestral property that has attracted the interest of a development company.

The company wants to turn the valuable property into a modern luxury resort and nothing will stop them. Trying to save their ancestral land, the four siblings also need to insulate themselves from some dark secrets that could destroy them.
Julian the eldest who has been married for more than a decade is secretly in love with another man. Mance the second son is unable to control his temper and for that reason, he has been to jail several times.

The eldest daughter is Cece who is a New York City lawyer that has stolen thousands of dollars from clients of her firm. Tokey the youngest daughter is wondering why she can never fit in the family and tries all manner of harmful ways to change things.
As the four come together to fight for their land, they begin to collide in unexpected ways even as their facades begin to crumble.