New Novel “The Road to Winona” Traces One Finnish-American Family’s Journey from Famine to the Copper Country
Debut author and longtime educator Dr. Shirley J. Williams turns three generations of family history into a sweeping work of historical fiction.
[CITY, STATE] Dr. Shirley J. Williams announces the release of her debut novel, The Road to Winona, a multigenerational saga following a Finnish immigrant family from the famine-stricken countryside of late nineteenth-century Finland to the copper mines and lumber camps of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The novel is available now on Amazon.
The Road to Winona opens in Sortavala, Finland, where a young man named Daniel and his sister Marija face a tightening grip of Russian rule, recurring crop failures, and the threat of conscription. When Daniel leaves for America, he carries with him a promise to the woman he loves and a determination to build a life worth the cost of leaving everything behind. What follows is a story spanning logging camps, copper mines, homesteads carved from raw timberland, the Great Depression, and two world wars, anchored by the woman who holds the family together through all of it: Marija, who crosses the Atlantic alone to stand beside her grieving brother and goes on to raise ten children, run a boarding house and sawmill, and become the steady center of a town built on hard-won land.
The novel is grounded in Williams’s own family history. Her great-grandmother’s life inspired the character of Marija, and the book is dedicated to the author’s Finnish ancestors, “whether living or in heaven.” Williams spent years researching her family’s history, drawing on archival research, oral accounts passed down through relatives, and her own childhood memories of visiting Winona, Michigan, where her family settled generations ago.
“This book started as an attempt to understand where I came from,” said Williams. “It became a way to make sure the people who built that life, often anonymously, in mills and mines and kitchens, are not lost to time.”
Before turning to fiction, Williams built a career in higher education, serving as a teacher, department chair, dean, and provost. The Road to Winona is her first novel.
About the Book
The Road to Winona (Self-Publishing LLC) is available now in eBook format on Amazon.
About the Author
Dr. Shirley J. Peterson Williams was born in Hancock, Michigan, and raised in part on her great-grandparents’ farm in the Upper Peninsula. After a career in higher education, she turned her research skills toward her own family’s history, resulting in The Road to Winona.