Joanne Dobson

In The Nurse Who Came from Away, author Joanne Dobson brings to life the extraordinary journey of her mother, Mildred McKinley Abele—an unassuming nurse whose quiet strength, sharp wit, and remarkable resilience shaped generations. Born in 1903 in rural New Brunswick, Canada, Mildred grew up in a house without electricity or indoor plumbing, surrounded by storytelling kin and the rugged beauty of the Miramichi River.

But Mildred wanted more than the confines of backwoods life. At twenty-four, with support from her sisters, she crossed the U.S. border to train as a nurse in Caribou, Maine—a decision that changed everything. Her voice—smart, sassy, often hilarious—comes alive in letters sent home over decades, chronicling a life in motion: nursing school, Depression-era struggles, bustling New York hospitals, love, loss, and the forming of a family far from home.

With tenderness and insight, Dobson recounts how these letters—long forgotten, some nearly destroyed—found their way back to her and her sisters, decades after their mother’s death. Through them, she reconstructs not only Mildred’s life, but also the rich oral tradition of a family that prized words, wit, and unspoken strength.

The Nurse Who Came from Away is a portrait of a working woman in the twentieth century—ordinary in some ways, extraordinary in others. It is a love letter to mothers and daughters, to the power of storytelling, and to the everyday courage of women who carved out meaningful lives in a world that often overlooked them.

A moving testament to a life lived with purpose—without fuss, but never without impact.

-Jennifer S. Tuttle, Director, Maine Women Writers Collection, University of New England

Publication Date June 2025

India 1857: Anna Wheeler Roundtree, missionary widow, flees her husband’s pious tyranny, leaving the safety of the Protestant Mission in which she’s spent most of the past decade. Her timing is bad: the train carrying her to freedom steams into the midst of the brutal Indian Rebellion. She is, however, plucked from danger by Ashok Montgomery, a wealthy Anglo-Indian tea planter. Together they escape the angry mobs.

New York 1861: Now a successful poet featured in national magazines, Anna is astonished to learn that the daughter she bore upon her return home was not stillborn, as she’d been told, but has been kidnapped. When Anna hears the baby described as dark-skinned, she realizes that Ashok, the man she left behind, is the true father, not her light skinned missionary husband. In her own racially inflamed country, on the verge of disastrous civil war, Anna throws respectability to the winds, learns to take risks, break rules, and trust strangers in a determined search for the little girl.

Then a deranged voice arises from her tormented past, making demands that compel her back to India. Anna must confront the evil that set her running in the first place. Will her daring quest for her child, and for the love of her life, end in triumph or in heartbreak?

Publication Date May 2014

In the debut novel, Quieter Than Sleep (1997), newbie English professor Karen Pelletier, is harassed at the Enfield College Christmas party by colleague Randy Astin-Berger, a hotshot academic superstar on the make. Literally. She eludes his persistent advances only, later, to open the coat closet in the foyer of the President’s House festively-decorated house and have the hotshot’s dead body fall into her arms.

In The Northbury Papers (1998), finding an unpublished nineteenth-century novel manuscript subjects Karen to suspicion and danger. In The Raven and the Nightingale (1999), a box of papers unearthed by the descendent of a nineteenth-century poetess rumored to have committed suicide for the love of Edgar Allan is the impetus for murder. . . . Then we have Cold and Pure and Very Dead (2000); The Maltese Manuscript (2003); and Death Without Tenure (2010). Not even the privileged world of academia is immune to murder.