Kathryn Cushman Books in Order

Kathryn Cushman grew up in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, a place that later helped inspire the fictional town of Shoal Creek in Another Dawn. Before she was a novelist, she earned a pharmacy degree from Samford University and worked as a pharmacist for about a decade.

Writing fiction had been on her mind for a long time. Cushman has said that she always planned to write a novel “someday,” but family life and a practical career kept that plan in the future. She eventually left pharmacy to spend more time at home with her daughters, while making room for the work she had wanted to try.

A family illness gave that dream extra urgency. When her husband’s uncle was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Cushman found herself asking what she might regret if time were suddenly limited. She began writing in 2003, prayed about the direction it might take, and treated the project as more than a passing hobby.

Her first two completed manuscripts stayed unpublished, by her own account. The third became A Promise to Remember, after she received her first contract in 2006. It arrived in print in 2007.

The long route mattered.

A Promise to Remember introduced a pattern that runs through much of Cushman’s work: people facing painful choices with no easy answer. Two mothers are joined by a fatal accident and its aftermath. In Waiting for Daybreak, a pharmacy setting turns professional ambition and financial need into a tense clash between two women. Leaving Yesterday asks a mother to weigh loyalty to her son against justice after a murder investigation reaches her family.

Cushman often starts with everyday situations, then lets the pressure build. Grief, addiction, illness, family secrets, strained relationships, and questions of forgiveness turn up often in her books. Her Christian faith is part of those stories, but the characters still have to make difficult calls, live with consequences, and work through their doubts.

Her pharmacy years also show up in the kinds of questions she explores. Another Dawn follows a mother caught in the fallout of a measles outbreak, while Chasing Hope brings together a former runner whose plans were changed by illness and a gifted teenager headed for trouble. Almost Amish takes a lighter-looking setup, a simple-living experiment near an Amish community, and uses it to look at burnout, family expectations, and the difference between wanting change and living it.

Later books broadened the settings without leaving behind those personal stakes. Finding Me follows a woman uncovering a hidden family history, and Fading Starlight pairs a stalled fashion career with the secrets of an old Hollywood figure. Cushman also co-wrote Angel Song with Sheila Walsh and The Plans We Made with Lauren Beccue.

Publisher biographies have placed Cushman and her family in Santa Barbara, California. Her books keep returning to the same useful question: what do people do after life refuses to follow the plan?