In 1860, amid rumblings of war, Sarah Eliza Mott, a teacher and only sister to five younger brothers, settles in Norfolk, Virginia, and finds ample fuel for her radical ideas about the abolition of slavery. Then, as she accompanies her father to Roanoke Island, North Carolina, she finds not only a kindred spirit in Lewis Sheldon Mann, a planter and mailboat captain, but an awakened sense of love. There’s no time for their relationship to mature and war intervenes. Two of her brothers join the Union cause and find themselves in harm’s way, and Lewis embarks on a dangerous mission to guide the Yankee invaders as they storm ashore near his Roanoke Island home. But, ultimately, distance and tragedy fail to keep the lovers apart.

JUST ACROSS THE SOUND is a true story of three cities and the effect the Civil War had upon the lives of two families—separating them, yet bind­ing them together.

Shirley Nesbit Sellers ：

Shirley Nesbit Sellers was born Shirley Mann Smith in 1926 in Norfolk, VA. A retired Norfolk Public Schools teacher, she holds B.S., M.S. degrees from Old Dominion University. Her poetry has been widely published in The Poetry Society of Virginia's anthologies and she has won many awards in the Society's yearly contests and in the Norfolk Chrysler Museum's Irene Leach Memorial Contests, and others. A chapbook, Where the Gulls Nest, Norfolk Poems, was published by Road Publishers, Painter, Virginia, and her 1993 manuscript of poetry, Winds from the Bay, was awarded second place in the 1997 National Federation of State Poetry Societies Manuscript Contest. Her short stories have also been published. She has been an active storyteller for children throughout her life. Just Across the Sound is her first novel. She has two children (and one deceased), five grandchildren and one great-grandchild. She resides in Norfolk where she remains active in writing.