Book Reviews

July 3, 2013 Set against a backdrop of explosive civil-rights unrest, Susan Crandall’s Whistling Past the Graveyard follows nine-year-old Starla, who is white, and Eula, a young black woman who has stolen an abandoned white infant, on a strange odyssey that will challenge everything they believe about themselves and the people they love, and change their lives forever, if they manage to survive. Susan Crandall will appear at the Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on July 12, 2013, at 6 p.m., and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on July 13, 2013, at 6:30 p.m. She will be joined at Parnassus by novelist Karen White.

July 2, 2013 “Standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me. Had you told me that I was seven again, I might have half-believed you, for a moment,” says the adult narrator of the new novel by fantasy-master Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. He is recalling a three-week school holiday in Sussex when he was seven years old, and the strange events that transpired—events both unforgettable and near-impossible to remember. Gaiman will appear at the War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville on July 10 as part of the Salon@615 series. This will be Gaiman’s final author tour. Tickets are $30 and include a copy of the book. Click here for complete ticketing information.

June 24, 2013 Anna Rosenthal is a thirty-five-year-old widow who can’t seem to move on with her life. Enter her estranged grandmother, Goldie, who demands that Anna drive her across country to return a set of Japanese prints that have been in her possession since World War II. The resulting journey could take the form of either farce or tragedy, but Dana Sachs makes The Secret of the Nightingale Palace a much more nuanced look at love, loss, and the secrets every life holds.

June 19, 2013 Philipp Meyer’s novel The Son ranges across Texas history from the years of the Republic to the oil boom of the 1980s, from the Comanches of the West to the Mexican ranches in the South, portraying a state steeped in violence and injustice. Focused on three generations of a single family, the novel punctures myths of the independent cowboy and the virtuous Native American, but it also provides a nostalgic view of a beautiful land all-too-quickly destroyed by commercial exploitation. Meyer will discuss The Son at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 25 at 6:30 p.m.