The Great Blue Hills of God: A Story of Facing Loss, Finding Peace, and Learning the True Meaning of Home, Hardcover

The creative force behind Blackberry Farm, Tennessee's award-winning farm-to-table resort, reveals how she found herself only after losing everything in this powerful memoir of resilience.

"I couldn't put down this wise, honest, beautifully written story."--Shauna Niequist, New York Times bestselling author of Present Over Perfect and Bread & Wine

Born with the gift of hospitality, Kreis Beall helped create one of the nation's most renowned resort destinations, Blackberry Farm, in Tennessee's Smoky Mountain foothills. For decades, she was a fixture in the travel and entertaining world and frequently appeared in the pages of popular home and design magazines. But at the pinnacle of her success, Kreis faced a series of challenges that reframed her life, including a brain injury that permanently impaired her hearing and the conclusion of her thirty-six-year marriage to her best friend and business partner, Sandy Beall.

Alone and uncertain as her world shifts and marriage ends, Kreis begins a new journey to find her faith and find God. After spending years on her beautiful exterior life and work, she begins the hardest undertaking of all: reclaiming and redesigning her interior life and soul.

Kreis retreats to Blackberry Farm, moving into an unassuming, 300-square-foot shed with peeling paint on the exterior walls, "where I met myself for the first time." She examines what it takes to redefine life after deep loss and acknowledges, for the first time, often unbearable truths that existed beneath the beauty she had created.

By turns fiercely honest, heartbreaking, and warm, Kreis Beall's story will resonate with anyone who can benefit from her discovery that "All it takes is all you've got. And it is worth it."

Kreis Beall is the co-founder of Blackberry Farm, an award-winning Relais & Chateaux resort in East Tennessee and one of the nation's premier destinations. Entrepreneurial and artistic, Kreis expresses her passion for life in a wide range of pursuits, from running an inn to designing beautiful spaces--many of which have been featured in leading home magazines for decades. Born in Tennessee, Kreis is the mother of two sons and a grandmother of seven, and a long-term survivor of traumatic brain injury. When she isn't writing or speaking about her book, Kreis is working on design projects, traveling with friends, spending time with her grandchildren, or dancing in the kitchen as she cooks.