Sarah Loudin Thomas

Sarah Loudin Thomas is an American author of historical and Christian fiction whose novels are rooted in the communities, landscape and cultural heritage of Appalachia. She grew up on a hundred-acre farm at French Creek, West Virginia, as the seventh generation of her family to live there, and earned a degree in English from Coastal Carolina University. Thomas later worked in public relations at the Biltmore Estate and served as the inaugural director of the Mitford Museum in North Carolina. Her fiction combines regional history with family secrets, romance, faith and the struggles of ordinary people living through economic hardship and social change. The Right Kind of Fool won the 2021 Selah Book of the Year, while Miracle in a Dry Season received the 2015 INSPY Award.

Her Appalachian Blessings series—Miracle in a Dry Season, Until the Harvest and A Tapestry of Secrets—follows interconnected families in twentieth-century West Virginia, exploring drought, bereavement, inherited secrets and rural community life. Her other historical novels include The Sound of Rain, set amid the aftermath of the 1916 flood and the changing industrial South; When Silence Sings, a story of rival families and forbidden love; and The Finder of Forgotten Things, centred on Depression-era mineral prospecting. The Right Kind of Fool combines a 1930s murder mystery with the experiences of a deaf boy, while These Tangled Threads draws upon the history of weaving and craftsmanship at the Biltmore Estate. These Blue Mountains moves between the First World War and 1933, following a German woman investigating the disappearance of her fiancé after his internment in North Carolina.