Author’s Talk featuring Carolyn Niethammer’s “The Home and Garden Emporium: A Novel of Resilience, Friendship, and Second Chances”

Books available from the author for purchase and autograph
Plants available for purchase from Lorien Tersey of Dreamflower Gardens

1917, Tucson. When her new husband chose going to war over starting life together, Ellie is left with a decaying hardware store and a pile of debt. Her choice: return to a dead-end future in the New York City tenements or reinvent the store into the Home and Garden Emporium. She’s desperate for customers, so when the government urges citizens to grow Liberty Gardens to add more vegetables to their diets, Ellie sees a marketing opportunity. She can help women learn to garden so they will need her rakes and shovels. It all happens with a roster of eclectic women neighbors and one handsome bachelor.

Advance review from Midwest Review: 

 “The Home and Garden Emporium” is the kind of novel that will linger in the mind and memory of the reader long after the book has been finished and set back upon the shelf.

Author

Carolyn Niethammer

Carolyn Niethammer has been writing about the food and people of the Southwest for six decades in books and newspaper and magazine articles. Four of her eleven books are cookbooks, three are books about Native American women, one is a travel book, and one of her three novels features a famous cook from Arizona history. Her work has been translated into German, French, and Korean. Her latest nonfiction “A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary History,” is a look at Southern Arizona’s food history over the last 8,000 years and is an answer to why Tucson was named the country’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy. She recently received the 2025 Jim Griffith Foodways Keeper Award.