Chance Encounter
Ann Patchett’s subtle, spirited new novel follows one 53-year-old woman as she reckons with her half-forgotten childhood and considers parenthood in a fresh light. Patchett will appear at Harpeth Hall School in Nashville on May 31.
The Devil in Many Guises
Rickey Fayne reimagines the Mephistophelean myth in his sumptuous novel The Devil Three Times, a multigenerational Black saga that limns the Atlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow South, and even the legend of blues maestro Robert Johnson.
A Timely Reckoning
David Narrett’s magisterial, detailed The Cherokees: In War and at Peace, 1670-1840 maps the Indigenous nation’s outsized influence on the history of the republic that dispossessed them of so much land and esteem.
Walking a Pitch-Dark Road
Code Name: Pale Horse, Scott Payne’s memoir of his years as an undercover agent infiltrating white supremacist groups, shines a glimmering light on our nation’s underbelly. Payne will discuss the book at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on March 27.
American Dreams
Aaron Robertson’s exacting, poetic The Black Utopians tracks the rise of Black nationalism, skeptical to its core, through a cadre of Detroit activists, knitting their creative and often militant ideas with memoir and his formerly incarcerated father’s letters, centering the question: “What does utopia look like in black?”
A Steely Commitment to Change
John Lewis’ career in public affairs spanned over 60 years, and he came to embody past, present, and future. In John Lewis: A Life, historian David Greenberg explores how the civil rights icon’s moral compass guided him from decade to decade. David Greenberg will appear at the 2024 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 26-27.
