Fiction

Tim Johnston’s new thriller, The Current, starts with a fatal car accident, when two college students are pushed into an icy river. The murder investigation dredges up painful memories of a similar tragedy ten years earlier. Johnston will appear at Novel in Memphis on February 12 and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 21.

Brenda Rickman Vantrease returns to the English civil war in A Far Horizon. The novel explores the way people manage to carry on, even as their country is being torn apart. Vantrease will speak at the Women’s National Book Association on February 7.

Brides in the Sky, the new story collection by Memphis writer Cary Holladay, brims with vibrant life, nuanced characters, and plots fueled by surprise and suspense. Holladay will discuss Brides in the Sky at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on February 5, at 5:30 p.m.

In The Weight of a Piano, novelist Chris Cander delivers a tale of generations and continents, a tragic love story, and a powerful meditation on the power of music—and of silence. Cander will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 1.

Terry Roberts’s new novel, The Holy Ghost Speakeasy and Revival, is a lyrical, dreamlike meditation on faith and death. It’s also a page-turning yarn about a law-breaking, wife-stealing, moonshine-running “man of God.” Roberts will speak at the Mildred Haun Conference at Walters State Community College in Morristown on February 1 and at the Rose Glen Literary Festival in Sevierville on February 23.

The trip to Memphis was supposed to be healing for combat veteran Peter Ash. Then he gets on the wrong side of both a powerful gang and a psychotic white supremacist. Nick Petrie will discuss Tear It Down at Novel in Memphis on January 22.