Patti Callahan -Surviving Savannah

As Patti Callahan began writing the novel, shortly after she started researching the long-ago shipwreck, it was finally discovered deep beneath the sea. As luck would have it, just a few weeks into Callahan’s research, the actual steamship Pulaski was found thirty miles off the coast of Wilmington, NC, a hundred feet deep. Callahan was given rare access to the recovery mission and the artifacts retrieved. The author used this special insight to shape details about the ship and its passengers in her novel. The characters are drawn from actual shipwreck victims and survivors, particularly the Lamar family of Savannah, who were used as the real-life inspiration for Callahan’s main characters.

In 1838, steam travel had become the way to travel north to escape dreadfully hot summers for well-to-do southerners. SURVIVING SAVANNAH follows one such family of eleven, the Longstreets, who boarded the luxury steamship together along with Savannah’s elite, but would never make it to their final destination as a boiler explosion sank the ship thirty miles off the coast of North Carolina with few survivors.

In present day Savannah, history professor Everly Winthrop is asked to guest-curate a new museum collection focusing on artifacts recovered from the steamship Pulaski, wreckage that was just discovered 180 years later. Everly has suffered a great loss of her own and this opportunity may just be the thing to save her from the grips of grief. As she dives into the research, she uncovers the astounding history of the Longstreets and two extraordinary women from this family: a known survivor, Augusta Longstreet, and her niece, Lilly Forsyth, who was never found, along with her child. These aristocratic women were part of Savannah's society, but when the ship exploded, each was faced with difficult decisions.

Patti Callahan is a New York Times bestselling author and is the recipient of the Harper Lee Award for Distinguished Writer of the Year. She is a frequent speaker at luncheons, book clubs, and women’s groups.