A Roanoke Story

Deahn Berrini

ISBN 978-1-935244-18-9

About the Book

In the summer of 1587, 115 English men, women, and children disappeared from the eastern shores of what is now called the United States of America, in northern North Carolina, leaving not a button, nor shoe, nor note, only some ambiguous carvings on trees, an incident commonly referred to as “The Mystery of the Roanoke Colony.” A Roanoke Story visits this unsolved puzzle from the perspective of the Native People who watched the ships come into their bay, a people who had lived on this shore since the beginning of history: the Roanoke. This simple change of point of view turns common myths on their heads, and guides us to confront the true beginnings of European colonization.

About the Author

Deahn Berrini's previous novels are Milkweed and How to Earn Your Keep. Although she travels widely, she has spent most of her life on the North Shore of Boston, where she now lives with her family, writes, and teaches. She is a graduate of Brown University and Boston College Law School.

Praise for A Roanoke Story

“A Roanoke Story takes us as close as we are likely to get to understanding the thoughts, feelings, words, and actions of Native men and women who could not leave any trace in the written record of themselves or of what they thought of the strangers who entered their lands.”

—James Horn, author of A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke

Praise for Milkweed by Deahn Berrini

“Deahn Berrini's Milkweed is a gentle revelation, a story whose apparent simplicity belies an unsettling resonance. It is the summer of 1971 and Cassie Leahy, working class daughter of Ipswich, Massachusetts, lives with her widowed father, rides her bike to work in a shellfish business, and wonders about her future. When Mark—high school friend and a boy Cassie feels she might be in love with—returns from Vietnam irrevocably changed, Milkweed opens into a journey of the heart that looks and feels all too much like today. Deahn Berrini has given us an American tapestry, filled with a vivid universe of kids on the edge, seekers, supplicants, the decent and the wayward and the lost, carried forward by a young woman's quest for understanding as she prepares to launch her life. And like the 10-year homecoming of that prototypical veteran Odysseus (whose story Cassie studies in a community college), Milkweed reminds us that war stories are still the oldest, hardest, and most telling and compelling tales we share.”

—Richard Currey, author of Fatal Light and Crossing Over: The Vietnam Stories

“Milkweed is one of the rare stories about the Vietnam War that tell the tale of the women who wait for their young men to return from the battlefield and the choices they are forced to make in the aftermath of the less than idyllic homecoming. In this compelling novel the heroine comes face to face with the reality of war and how it affects her life as deeply as it affects her returning hero; a young man unable to escape the chaos and tragedy of his months in combat. Berrini has crafted a fine story that will stay with the reader long after the final words are read.”

—Donna Moreau, author of Waiting Wives: The Story of Schilling Manor; Homefront to the Vietnam War