Lisa Wingate

Before We Were Yours put Georgia Tann on a bestseller list: the Memphis matron who ran the Tennessee Children's Home Society for nearly thirty years, took children from poor families and sold them to wealthy ones across the country, and was never charged. The Book of Lost Friends is built on a real newspaper column of the same name, in which people freed from slavery placed advertisements searching for the relatives who had been sold away from them. Wingate was a journalist first, and her method is the same each time: find a piece of documented American history that almost nobody knows, then run a modern narrator into it.