One Beautiful Year of Normal

A Novel

Sandra K. Griffith

• Publisher: She Writes Press
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9798896360810
• Subtopic: Women in Fiction

A must-read for fans of character-driven suspense like Liz Moore’s Long Bright River and A. J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window, One Beautiful Year of Normal is a gripping psychological thriller about a woman’s dangerous decision to unearth her family’s darkest secrets.

Some memories protect you. Others imprison you.

When August Caine receives a phone call from a Savannah attorney, she is blindsided by the news—her Aunt Helen has passed away. But how can that be, when August’s mother insisted Helen died in a car accident fifteen years ago? Determined to uncover the truth, August returns to the deep South, where the ghosts of her past—both real and imagined—await her.

Plagued by a memory splintered by her father’s unsolved murder when she was a child and further tangled by psychiatric treatments for the debilitating depression she struggles with, August realizes her survival depends on unraveling the mystery surrounding her father’s death. This means returning to the one safe place she remembers from the childhood she has mostly locked away inside her mind: Aunt Helen’s home, and the ghost tours they created together. 

A chilling exploration of mental illness, mother-daughter bonds, and generational secrets, One Beautiful Year of Normal follows August as she pieces together the long-buried truths that shaped her family’s tragic past and confronts the question that has haunted her for years: Can the truth set her free, or will it unravel everything she thought she knew?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Chapter One. When the Past Finds You
• Chapter Two. Meeting Helen
• Chapter Three. The Beginning of the End
• Chapter Four. Victory Drive
• Chapter Five. Back to the Old House
• Chapter Six. Photographs
• Chapter Seven. Songs in the Key of Memory
• Chapter Eight. Montgomery Street
• Chapter Nine. Summer of Change
• Chapter Ten. When Memory Finds You
• Chapter Eleven. The Tour
• Chapter Twelve. Storytelling
• Chapter Thirteen. When in the South
• Chapter Fourteen. Evening Light
• Chapter Fifteen. A Willing Student
• Chapter Sixteen. Time Capsules
• Chapter Seventeen. Old at Eleven
• Chapter Eighteen. Lies and Half-truths
• Chapter Nineteen. With Us Always
• Chapter Twenty. Grams
• Chapter Twenty-One. The Holidays
• Chapter Twenty-Two. Choose to Believe
• Chapter Twenty-Three. My Twelfth Birthday
• Chapter Twenty-Four. Healing Waters
• Chapter Twenty-Five. Kat
• Chapter Twenty-Six. Memorial Day and Memories
• Chapter Twenty-Seven. August Misc.
• Chapter Twenty-Eight. Pandora’s Box
• Chapter Twenty-Nine. Moonlight and Tragedy
• Chapter Thirty. Lost, Then Found
• Chapter Thirty-One. Parting
• Chapter Thirty-Two. Elle a Disparu
• Chapter Thirty-Three. The Untethering
• Chapter Thirty-Four. Lucy
• Chapter Thirty-Five. Mon Oncle
• Chapter Thirty-Six. Luminescence in Savannah
• Chapter Thirty-Seven. The Lens
• Chapter Thirty-Eight. Letting Go
• Chapter Thirty-Nine. Gifts
• Chapter Forty. Birthday Guests
• Chapter Forty-One. Apparition
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
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