Winner of the 2025 Sarton Award in historical fiction from Story Circle Network.
Winner of the 2025 Sarton Award in historical fiction
A Family of Good Women by Teddy Jones is a historical mystery set in Borger, Texas, during the oil boom. When Imogene Good, still grieving her mother’s death, leaves behind a promising teaching career to open a boarding house in a rough, near-lawless town, she faces danger, loneliness, and a question that cuts to the heart of the story: what does family really mean?
Winner of the 2025 Sarton Award in historical fiction from Story Circle Network.
What is the true meaning of family?
Inspired by historical events, A Family of Good Women by award-winning author Teddy Jones is a compelling tale of inner strength, the bonds of family, and the power of the human spirit.
Grieving her mother, Imogene Good leaves a promising teaching career to open a boarding house alone in Borger, Texas — a near-lawless oil boomtown of the 1920s Panhandle. Alone.
The boarding house thrives, love arrives in the form of mysterious Texas Ranger, and Imogene takes in a stray dog and a runaway cousin from the Good family farm in East Texas. But months later, as fatigue, mounting threats, and violence against her business threatens to overwhelm her, she finds refuge in the contents of a trunk she carted to town after her mother’s death.
In it, Imogene finds secrets about the women who raised her that changes her life and her understanding of family. Can the Good women build a new life from the ashes of hardship on the inhospitable plains of the 1920s Texas Panhand
Category: Historical Fiction, Women
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-965766-24-8
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-965766-25-5
Pages: 354
Trim size: 5.5 x 8.5
Joe Holley, Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and author“Only a wise, witty and compassionate novelist could rescue from the dry pages of history a group of Victorian-era Texas women who resolved to no longer live as "man's chattel." Teddy Jones is that novelist. Inspired by the remarkable—and not widely known—Sanctified Sisters of Belton, she tells an ingenious story within a story that brings two generations of strong women to vivid and engaging life.”
John Dufresne, author of My Darling Boy“Award-winning novelist and speaker Teddy Jones is back with a riveting and gorgeous novel that is a braiding of a family’s fifty-year saga on one hand and the struggles of a single woman making her way in the down-and-dirty man’s world that was the Borger, Texas, oil patch in the 1920s on the other. Just try to catch your breath. Teddy Jones knows that telling a suspenseful story means making up secrets and revealing them slowly. So many secrets here, so much treachery, corruption, and greed. And so much kindness. Read this heartfelt and poignant novel, friends. Trust me, you’ll love these characters as much as the author so obviously does. A Family of Good Women is such a celebration of decency, resolve, and love that you’ll want to throw a party for the book when you’ve finished.”
Cynthia Leal Massey, award-winning author of Well of Deception“A Family of Good Women takes readers to Prohibition-era Texas, with the finely wrought characters of Imogene Good and her “cousin” Sue Ellen Good, descendants of early members of a religious sect of women, slowly peeling away the layers of their past lives. In the boarding house they run, Imogene and Sue Ellen find themselves surrounded by the very thing their female ancestors felt compelled to shun—men. What the young women learn is both scary and wonderful.”
A Family of Good Women follows Imogene Good through her first year running a boarding house in the 1920s oil boomtown of Borger, Texas. The business succeeds, a Texas Ranger arrives, and a runaway cousin and a stray dog attach themselves to her. Then the threats start, and she opens the trunk she brought from her mother’s house.
It won the 2025 Sarton Award in historical fiction, presented by Story Circle Network.
The characters are invented, but they were inspired by the Sanctified Sisters of Belton, a group of Victorian-era Texas women who resolved to no longer live as “man’s chattel.” Borger, Texas during its 1920s oil boom was a real and notoriously lawless place.
Winner of the 2025 Sarton Award in historical fiction from Story Circle Network.
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Joe Holley, Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and author“Only a wise, witty and compassionate novelist could rescue from the dry pages of history a group of Victorian-era Texas women who resolved to no longer live as "man's chattel." Teddy Jones is that novelist. Inspired by the remarkable—and not widely known—Sanctified Sisters of Belton, she tells an ingenious story within a story that brings two generations of strong women to vivid and engaging life.”
John Dufresne, author of My Darling Boy“Award-winning novelist and speaker Teddy Jones is back with a riveting and gorgeous novel that is a braiding of a family’s fifty-year saga on one hand and the struggles of a single woman making her way in the down-and-dirty man’s world that was the Borger, Texas, oil patch in the 1920s on the other. Just try to catch your breath. Teddy Jones knows that telling a suspenseful story means making up secrets and revealing them slowly. So many secrets here, so much treachery, corruption, and greed. And so much kindness. Read this heartfelt and poignant novel, friends. Trust me, you’ll love these characters as much as the author so obviously does. A Family of Good Women is such a celebration of decency, resolve, and love that you’ll want to throw a party for the book when you’ve finished.”
Cynthia Leal Massey, award-winning author of Well of Deception“A Family of Good Women takes readers to Prohibition-era Texas, with the finely wrought characters of Imogene Good and her “cousin” Sue Ellen Good, descendants of early members of a religious sect of women, slowly peeling away the layers of their past lives. In the boarding house they run, Imogene and Sue Ellen find themselves surrounded by the very thing their female ancestors felt compelled to shun—men. What the young women learn is both scary and wonderful.”
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