Heading Home

Author: John Malone
Publisher: Riverman Press
ISBN 978-0-6151-5239-4

Heading Home is John Malone's new novel, a fascinating page-turner based on the lives of his great-grandparents, set in the Ohio River Valley during and after the Civil War.

Heading Home, a sequel to Farewell Forever, picks up the story of the Malone family after the outbreak of the Civil War as young Tom Malone, the author's great-grandfather, runs away from his parents' home in Brownsville with his older brother, Pete, to enlist, beginning a series of adventures and narrow escapes on the Ohio, Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers in war and peace.

In 1870, Tom meets Roxa Powell, a Baptist and the one true love of his life, in the little river town of Antiquity, Ohio. The two marry, in spite of the objections of Tom's strict Catholic parents, who disown him. Seeking a home of their own without the long separations imposed by Tom's work as the mate of the steam towboat Alice Brown, he and Roxa finally come up the river in 1880 and "climb the bank" to a new life of peace and happiness in Pittsburgh.