Tina Chambers

“It was a bitch growing up in Birmingham. Unless you were white. And Earl B. Peterson wasn’t white,” writes Maryville author Rhonda Lynn Rucker in her young adult novel, Welcome to Bombingham. Rucker shines a spotlight on the systemic racism and unchecked violence that plagued the black community in early 1960s Birmingham, Alabama.

In Susan Beckham Zurenda’s debut novel, Bells for Eli, narrator Delia Green describes her close relationship through the years with her cousin Eli, whose family lives across the street in the small town of Green Branch, South Carolina. Their bond endures in the wake of an accident that changes both their lives forever. Zurenda will discuss Bells for Eli at The Arts Building in Chattanooga on March 2.

The Story Seeker, the second entry in Nashville writer Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s New York Public Library series for middle school readers, takes place in early 1929. Its protagonist, a vivacious 11-year-old named Viviani, is a lover of stories — and a mystery-solving sleuth. Tubb will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 30 and at Barnes & Noble at Hamilton Place Mall in Chattanooga on March 24.

Through 13 linked stories, Leaf Seligman’s From the Midway creates a world apart: the tragic, broken-down world of a second-rate traveling carnival in early 20th-century America. It is a beautifully written and deeply affecting meditation on the barriers that separate us from one another and from our own deepest longings.