Join The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations between Cash and his author friends as they discuss how North Carolina inspires them on the Our State Book Club podcast.
Like many recent college graduates, Sarah Addison Allen found herself living at home. It was 1994, and she was back at her mom’s house in Asheville. But unlike a lot of people fresh out of school, Allen already had a strong sense of who she was.
“I called myself a writer,” she says. “Therefore, I was one. I was trying very hard to get to the point where I could support myself and not live with my mom.”
Allen spent years dealing with rejection from agents and publishers. Then, in 2003, she suddenly found herself on the verge of what she assumed would be her big break when she published a novel, Tried and True, with Harlequin under the pseudonym Katie Gallagher. With her foot in the door, Allen assumed more book deals would follow.
“But Harlequin didn’t want another book after that,” she says. “That was probably the darkest period in my early career.”
It didn’t stay dark for long. Allen set her literary sights closer to home. She began work on a new novel called Garden Spells about two sisters named Claire and Sydney whose family has lived in a small mountain town for generations while curating a garden that teems with magical plants. It was published in 2007 and became an instant New York Times best seller. Since then, Allen has published six more best-selling novels that have been translated into dozens of languages and sold more than 2 million copies.
illustration by Andrea Cheung
But as Allen forged the successful writing career she had dreamt of, her personal life was filled with hardship. In 2011, she was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer at 39. She battled the illness into remission and kept writing, only to experience tragedy in 2015 when her mother suffered a traumatic brain injury. In 2019, she lost her older sister, Sydney. Her mother, who Allen describes as her best friend, died 10 days later.
The losses were staggering and disorienting. She had begun a new novel just before her mother’s injury, but she had to pause her writing to care for her. When Allen returned to the novel, she found that not only had she changed, but her novel had too.
The book, Other Birds, released in 2022, is just as laced with magic as her earlier works, but the story is weighted with the grief of a young woman named Zoey who, in the wake of her mother’s death, attempts to understand who she is. She finds a family that, although not hers by blood, offers Zoey the balm of belonging.
At their core, all of Allen’s novels are about finding your people, even if it seems like they’ve left you behind. But books can change as their authors’ lives change, too.
“Out of all of my books, the characters in Garden Spells most closely resemble people I know,” Allen says. “My sister [and I] had a very contentious relationship just like the sisters Claire and Sydney in the novel. But it would probably be a different book if I wrote it now. Now it would be tinged with regret. You don’t really have that kind of regret when you’re younger, particularly with a sibling, because you think you’re going to have all this time to hash out your differences, but you don’t.”
Garden Spells was the first and last sister story that Allen has published, but all of her novels share a grounded sense of place inspired by her native Asheville, where she still lives, a place that inspires new ideas while keeping the memories of her loved ones close at hand.
The 2025-26 Elon University Speaker Series brings purposeful voices to the forefront. Hear from Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky, techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci and Army intelligence officer Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Robert P. Ashley, Jr., as they explore what drives leaders to make a difference.
photograph by Matt Hulsman
Everyone in the mountain town of Bascom, North Carolina, knows the Waverly family. They know there’s something special about the apple tree that grows in their backyard.
After their mother disappears without a trace, sisters Claire and Sydney are left to be raised by their grandmother. Claire becomes a successful caterer in town, secretly relying on the family’s herbs and blooms to work magic on her customers, while Sydney has vanished. But when Sydney returns with her young daughter, Bay, in tow, she not only upsets the careful balance of Claire’s life, she brings with her a dark past that not even the strongest magic can keep hidden.
Garden Spells is the story of two sisters who must decide if they’re willing to heal their pasts in order to secure the future of their relationship.
More to Explore: Hear from Sarah Addison Allen in new episodes out December 2 and 9. Listen at ourstate.com/podcasts.
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