Book Reviews

John Muir’s A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf chronicles the famed conservationist’s trek through the South in 1867. In A Road Running Southward, Dan Chapman, a Georgia-based environmental reporter, follows Muir’s path on foot and by Subaru, observing nature at risk from mountain forests to coastal estuaries. 

Imani Perry’s South to America weaves history, travelogue, and memoir to argue that the U.S. South is not a place apart, but central to the American story. 

When a young woman’s estranged father is found dead, her investigation into a seemingly insignificant vintage map in his possession leads her down a path fraught with riddles, conspiracies, secrets, and lies. Peng Shepherd’s The Cartographers is an otherworldly thriller that will appeal to fans of V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library.

From the outset, it’s clear that young Maggie knows more than she’s saying about her cousin Charisse’s disappearance and murder in Valerie Nieman’s coming of age/suspense thriller In the Lonely Backwater.

Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow is the touching and suspenseful story of a woman given the chance to relive her 16th birthday and make choices that have the power to change the course of her future. Straub will discuss the novel with Margaret Renkl at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 18.