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Print: $15.00 A fast-moving tale of life on the river...
This is the story of Tom and Roxa Malone, who lived and loved in the Ohio River Valley many years ago. The story starts as the Confederate Army crosses the Potomac in September, 1862, invading the North. Tom tries to run away from his strict Irish immigrant parents to enlist in the Pennsylvania Volunteers but is rejected because he is too young and receives a beating when he returns home to his parents. Two years later he finally breaks away from his overbearing parents and goes to work as a deckhand on the towboat Shark, beginning a series of adventures and narrow escapes in both war and peace. The annual rise and fall of the Ohio River begins to dominate Tom's life as he searches for his dream, finding happiness at last with his beloved Roxa. But he is not yet free of the bonds that still tie him to his family and to his Catholic faith...
Based on a true story, this little book is full of fascinating real-life characters, traditions, places and events.
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John Malone,
born in 1935 in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, a small town on the Ohio River fifteen miles downstream from Pittsburgh, is a descendant of pioneer rivermen. Both his great-grandfather and his great-great-grandfather were mates on steamboats running between Pittsburgh and New Orleans during the 1800’s. After a thirty-year career with the World Bank, including eight years living and working in Africa and Indonesia, he and his wife retired to the mountains of Western North Carolina, where he wrote his successful first novel, “Farewell Forever,” (Trafford Publishing, September 2005), about a young couple, Jack and Margaret Malone, falling in love and leaving Ireland for America just before the Famine to settle on the Monongahela River in Brownsville, Pennsylvania. “Heading Home,” a sequel to “Farewell Forever,” picks up the story of the Malone family after the outbreak of the Civil War in 1862, as Tom Malone, Jack and Margaret's second son, prepares to run away from home and enlist in the army.
PRAISE FOR "HEADING HOME"
“Part novel, part memoir, Heading Home is an affectionate family narrative about John Malone's great-grandparents, a love story and account of river navigation on the Ohio in the nineteenth century. Malone brings history alive with vivid detail, and brings us a stronger sense of our own roots, our true home, in the family and community that reach across time.”
Robert Morgan, Author of “Gap Creek” and “Brave Enemies”
“Heading Home is a wonderful novel, based on facts from the author’s family history…It is exciting, entertaining and takes the reader back in time, giving a very lively insight.”
Steamboats.org Book of the Month, reviewed by Franz Neumaier
“A model of fictionalized family history, smartly researched and fluidly written.”
Rob Neufeld, Asheville Citizen-Times
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