debut historical fiction
The Fevered World
A father and daughter—he a serious and scientific country doctor, she an audacious young woman fresh from nursing school—are thrust onto the front lines of the 1918 influenza pandemic and World War I. Tested by grief, politics, and the unrelenting demands of duty, they must wrestle with their beliefs and their bond to find purpose and family amid unfathomable devastation.
When Duties Collide, How Do You Choose?
On the Kansas prairie, as The Great War rages in Europe, Dr. Lorne Miller confronts an invisible enemy, a flu-like illness swiftly killing otherwise healthy adults. As answers remain elusive and fear spreads, his daughter Helen returns home from nursing school, eager to make her way in the world. When Lorne makes an agonizing choice he will forever regret, Helen—struggling between independence and family—defiantly joins the Army Nurse Corps and sails for Europe.
From America’s heartland to New York City’s Department of Health and field hospitals in France, father and daughter navigate parallel paths. Lorne seeks answers in science, determined to develop a vaccine, while Helen faces the chaos of combat surgery and confusion of love. Separated by an ocean but bound by loss, each must confront the limits of conviction and control.
For readers drawn to The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue and The Women by Kristin Hannah, this historical fiction explores how ordinary people endure in times of crisis and how purpose and connection carry them forward.
“Not til we are lost, do we begin to find ourselves.”
Henry David Thoreau
Meet Author Dee Andrews
My writing began with a question: in 1918, how did a virus travel from a remote corner of southwestern Kansas around the world to kill over 50 million people?
Years later, that curiosity grew into my novel The Fevered World and a body of work exploring family, resilience, and the search for home.
