The war is over. But peace has not arrived.

Deep in the Mississippi Delta, hidden among the willow brakes and cypress water, sits a leaning shack called The Crooked Lantern. By day, it is little more than a weathered building. By night, it becomes something else entirely?a kitchen, a juke, a sanctuary, a church for the weary.

The people who gather there are newly freed men and women, laborers, drifters, widows, veterans, and souls trying to learn what freedom is supposed to feel like.

At the center of it all stands Miss Odessa. She cooks. She remembers. She keeps people alive.

Then one rainy night, a stranger arrives wearing a faded Union coat and carrying enough ghosts to fill the Delta. He comes looking for nothing. But he finds a place that feeds more than hunger.

Over the seasons that follow, he will discover that every community has two kinds of liquor:

The liquor in the bottle that helps a person forget.

And the liquor in the pot that teaches a person how to live again.

In Eden Ridge, both are served. But only one can heal a soul.

And before the story is done, the stranger will have to decide which one he intends to drink from.

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Pot Liquor is a historical novel about survival, community, and the long, slow work of healing after a war that didn't end when the guns went silent.