The Water Women, a novel by Bonnie Blaylock, tells the decades-long story of a fictional family of women dedicated to the historical harvesting of “byssus,” long keratin fibers produced by a particular type of mollusk found in abundance around the Italian island of Sardinia, where the story takes place. Blaylock will appear at Reading Rock Books in Dickson on April 2.
In Ruby Falls, the latest novel by Gin Phillips, eight people enter a Tennessee cave for a publicity stunt that does not go according to plan, and one winds up dead. Who among them is the murderer?
“Had I changed us, made us friends, would I have turned his fate?” asks Leah Gavin, the narrator of Sheri Joseph’s novel Angels at the Gate. Loosely based on the author’s time at the University of the South in the 1980s, Joseph says the story is “about the thrill of creating oneself in youth and the paths taken and not taken that lead to regret.”
In The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush, Susan Gregg Gilmore has crafted a compassionate story about a community of flawed people and the 12-year-old boy who tries his best to deliver them from the weight of the world. Susan Gregg Gilmore will appear at Novel in Memphis on September 2, Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on September 11, and the 2025 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 18-19.
In his new novel, Run for the Hills, Sewanee author Kevin Wilson takes readers on an unconventional road trip with four siblings eager to ask some hard questions of their long-lost father. Wilson will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 15 and Novel in Memphis on May 16.
Making sense of the land mines of life is the theme of Nashville author Mary Laura Philpott’s memoir in essays, Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives. Philpott will appear with Margaret Renkl at a fundraiser for The Porch at Juniper Green in Nashville on May 2.
