Home Fires Burning

Set in a small southern town during the last year of World War II, Home Fires Burning is the story of a community poised on the precipice of change that will alter the lives of its in habitants forever. Cantankerous Jake Tibbetts, editor of the town newspaper, reflects the paper’s role as the voice and conscience of the community with a code of conduct based on honor, duty and his conviction that a man must take hold of his life and “shake it for all it’s worth.” But the war has shaken the very bedrock of the lives of everyone in town. Now, desperate to find meaning in a world he thought he once understood, Jake struggles to accommodate the people in his grandson Lonnie, who is gamely working at growing up; Henry, Jake’s estranged alcoholic son, lost somewhere in the battlefields of Europe; Pastine, Jake’s wife, who erupts in fury at Jake’s stubbornness; Jake’s oldest friend, Rosh Benefield, whose loyalty is nearly severed by Jake’s thoughtlessness; and the town itself, with which Jake rashly starts his own war. Home Fires Burning is a deeply-felt novel that evokes the nostalgia and lost innocence of a vanished world. Robert Inman adapted the story for a “Hallmark Hall of Fame” movie, which is available through Amazon and Netflix.