Follow Me: A Novel

On a summer day in 1946, Sally Werner, the precocious daughter of hardscrabble Pennsylvania farmers, accepts her cousin Daniel's invitation to ride his new motorcycle. Like so much of what follows in Sally's life, it's a decision driven by impulse and a thirst for adventure, a decision with dramatic and far-reaching consequences.
Soon Sally abandons her newborn baby, the result of her impetuous joyride. Shamed, confused, and filled with a yearning to have a bigger life than the one ahead of her, she finds work, she finds love, she finds people of great kindness and others whose cruelty would crush a weaker woman. Fueled in equal measure by her eternal optimism and her mercurial moods, she embarks on an odyssey of self-creation that spans six decades, the story of which she entrusts to only one person: her granddaughter and namesake. It's an uncommon legacy that young Sally believes until her father - a man she has never known - enters her life and offers another story altogether, forcing her to uncover the truth of her grandmother's secret history.

Joanna Scott is the author of nine books, including The Manikin, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Various Antidotes and Arrogance, which were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; and the critically acclaimed Make Believe, Tourmaline, and Liberation. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Award, she lives with her family in upstate New York.