Silas House’s The Tulip Poplars tells the story of four friends who come together as children in the fictional mountain town of Bright Star, Kentucky, and how their complicated relationships change and grow over five decades. Silas House will appear at the 2026 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 17-18 and St. James Episcopal Church in Knoxville on October 22.
In Alan Gratz’s new middle-grade novel, Flight: A Story of Seeking Refuge, 13-year-old Daniella Lopez and her 9-year-old brother Carlos travel north from their home in Honduras in search of a better life.
In All the Sunshine in the World, her third middle-grade novel in verse, Nashville poet and educator Caroline Brooks Dubois once again examines the aftermath of tragedy in the life of a young girl. This time, her subject is the sudden, shocking loss of a sibling. The author will appear at the 2026 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 17-18.
In Backstory: A Literary Life on the Run, Lawrence Wells and Dean Faulkner Wells offer readers an enjoyable ride of their own through a collaborative collection of short pieces written between 1978 and Dean’s death in 2011. Lawrence Wells will discuss the book at Novel in Memphis on August 22 and the 2026 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 17-18.
Seventeen-year-old Stella Bohdan is a medium in 1912 New York City who finds her connection to the spirit world a dubious distinction: “I am never alone, never, and yet I’m the loneliest person I know, dead or alive,” Stella complains in The Spiritualists, the debut YA novel by Kristin O’Donnell Tubb. The author will appear at Bound Booksellers in Franklin on June 6 and Ernest Tubb Record Shop in Nashville on June 11.
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.
