Hearts Unbound: Breaking Chains with Love A Novel
Sixty years ago, a girl's arm was broken on the Carrow Bridge. The man who broke it has kept her scarf ever since.
In the small river town of Harlow, Georgia, everyone knows which side of the water they belong on. Then a summer thunderstorm traps five strangers in a church that used to be a tire store, and a pastor tells them something none of them can shake: the wall is already down.
Emma is a pre-law student who has spent her life trying to be twice as good. Malik is a Syrian refugee who believes he must earn the right to have survived. Grace is an artist who has never known where she belongs. Carlos is an organizer whose little brother keeps ending up on the hood of a deputy's car. Hannah is a theology student who has just found a photograph from 1965: her grandfather, a raised club, and a seventeen-year-old girl on the ground.
The girl is Emma's grandmother.
What begins as a promise made by candlelight in an abandoned chapel grows into suppers, silent vigils, and a march across the same bridge where history went wrong. Along the way come hate mail and a brick through the church window. Then an arrest that could send one of them back to a country that no longer exists.
But Hearts Unbound isn't a story about heroes. It's about ordinary, wounded people learning that they cannot break their own chains, and that they never had to. Forgiveness goes where no one expects it to go: to a dying deputy, a bitter shopkeeper, and a man who never says he's sorry.
Tender and funny, and rooted in the grace of the gospel, Hearts Unbound is a novel about the weight we carry, the One who already carried it, and what becomes possible when we finally put it down.
Includes discussion questions for book clubs and small groups.
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