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.
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.
