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Celebrate Susan Beckham Zurenda's latest release, No Way Out but Through, with us. No Way Out but Through is a powerful, true-to-life novel inspired by months of interviews with the real woman behind its protagonist, Grace. While many books explore domestic abuse, few confront the reality of a modern-day child bride. Grace’s strength, vulnerability, and resilience make her an unforgettable “everywoman” whose story speaks to readers everywhere.
Susan Beckham Zurenda taught English for 33 years on the college level and at the high school level to AP students. Her debut novel, Bells for Eli (Mercer University Press, March 2020; paperback edition March 2021), was selected the first place winner for Best First Book—Fiction in the 2021 IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Awards), a Foreword Indie Book Award finalist, a Winter 2020 Okra Pick by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, a 2020 Notable Indie on Shelf Unbound, a 2020 finalist for American Book Fest Best Book Awards, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for 2021. Her second novel, The Girl From the Red Rose Motel (Mercer University Press, September 2023), was the recipient of the 2024 Patricia Winn Award in Southern Fiction, Gold Medal winner in the 2024 IPPY Awards for Southeast Fiction, a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee, a Shelf Unbound 2023 Notable 100 books, and a finalist in the American Book Fest Awards. Susan has won numerous awards for her short fiction, including winning the South Carolina Fiction Prize twice. Her new novel, No Way Out but Through (Post Hill Press), was published in August 2026. The author lives in Spartanburg, SC. Learn more at www.susanzurenda.com.
About the Book
Two women of different generations—one scarred by an abusive teen marriage and the other by an alcoholic husband—come together to grapple with their inner demons and confront their untold stories.
When author Shannon Irwin meets Grace Ferrall and agrees to interview the younger woman and tell the story of Grace’s forced child marriage and harrowing youth, these very different women begin an unlikely relationship. Grace’s ordeal starts in Louisiana, with an alcoholic father and a mother whose mood swings are often intolerable. When Grace is barely fifteen and living in Oklahoma, her mother manipulates her into marrying Rafe, a scurrilous, older man. Pregnant at sixteen, Grace is soon living in a truck near a river in Oregon with Rafe’s cult-like family.
After years of abuse and multiple pregnancies and miscarriages, with the help of an unlikely ally, Grace escapes. But her newfound freedom is fragile, and she is forced to make impossible choices to protect herself and her two daughters. Trust builds between the women as Grace shares details she has never told anyone, while Shannon, with a daughter Grace’s age, and ridden with guilt about her former marriage, reveals the dysfunction in her own life and the remorse she suffers.
A searing and compassionate exploration set in present-day Pawleys Island, South Carolina, and 1990s rural Oklahoma, No Way Out but Through is inspired by the real life of an ordinary woman who survived extraordinary circumstances.
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