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Richmond resident Margaret Edds is a former staff writer for The Virginian-Pilot, first covering state government and politics and then switching to editorial writing before retiring in 2007. She is the author of three books, including “An Expendable Man: The Near-Execution of Earl Washington, Jr.” What does it mean to lose your mother before reason and understanding take root? Virginia journalist Margaret Edds, barely three when her young mother died of complications from rheumatic fever in 1950, wanted to know. Drawing on the nearly lost medium of letters and traveling a path that led through Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the secret World War II city that helped birth the atomic bomb, and Lynch, Kentucky, a unique town in the heart of the Bloody Harlan coal fields, she discovered the vibrant, imperfect, deeply human woman at her core. She arrived, too, at a sober realization of how one untimely death can reverberate through generations. Finding Sara is a unique and heartwarming memoir that resurrects a lost relationship and a gentler America. "Beautifully told and incredibly moving . . . achingly real." —Lee Smith, author of The Lost Girls, Southern Book Critics Circle Award