A Hundred Years of Happiness

Nicole Seitz is the author of six critically acclaimed novels - Beyond Molasses Creek, The Inheritance of Beauty, Saving Cicadas, A Hundred Years of Happiness, Trouble the Water, and The Spirit of Sweetgrass. Her paintings are featured on several of her books. She is a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Journalism, and also has a degree in Illustration from Savannah College of Art & Design. Nicole is a regular contributor to the Southern authors' blog, Southern Belle View and has had short stories, essays and articles published in The Charleston City Paper, Literary Dogs & Their South Carolina Writers, Lowcountry Dog Magazine, and SouthCarolina Magazine. Her original monologue, "The Longing" was part of Listen to Your Mother-Charleston in 2014. Nicole lives in the Charleston, SC area with her husband and two children, and teaches visual arts to elementary and high school students at a local private school.

A beautiful young woman. An American soldier. A war-torn country. Nearly forty years of silence.

Now, two daughters search for the truth they hope will set them free and the elusive peace their parents have never found.


In the South Carolina Lowcountry, a young mother named Katherine Ann is struggling to help her tempestuous father by plunging into a world of secrets he never talks about. A fry cook named Lisa is trying desperately to reach her grieving Vietnamese mother who has never fully adjusted to life in the States. And somewhere far away, a lost soul named Ernest is drifting, treading water, searching for what he lost on a long-ago mountain.


They're all yearning for connection. For the war that touched them to finally end. For their hundred years of happiness at long last to begin.


From the beloved author of The Spirit of Sweetgrass  and Trouble the Water comes this generous story of family, war, loss, and longing . . . of the ways we hide from those we love, and the ways that love finds us anyway.