December 14, 2010 After a day of fighting mall crowds in search of this year’s must-have gizmo, there may be no better holiday treat than settling down with a cup of coffee and a Santa cookie and spending a few hours in Second Creek, Mississippi, with Robert Dalby’s A Piggly Wiggly Christmas. Dalby will read from and sign copies of the book this week at public libraries in Crossville, Murfreesboro, Collierville, and Clarksville. Check Chapter 16’s events section for details.

November 15, 2010 if you’re a former Miss Alabama, and you’re determined to do away with yourself with as little attention and mess as possible, you have quite a bit of planning to do. And though a suicide attempt might not seem like the best foundation for a comic novel, in Fannie Flagg’s newest, the ever-present humor is neither mocking nor unsympathetic. Flagg will discuss and sign I Still Dream about You at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on November 16 at 7 p.m.

October 22, 2010 Lady Emily has not had the most auspicious beginnings to married life. Her first husband, essentially a stranger, died as a newlywed. On her second honeymoon, she was shot while helping her husband Colin, a British intelligence agent, on one of his investigations and suffered a subsequent miscarriage. In Dangerous to Know, Tasha Alexander’s fifth Lady Emily novel, the protagonists have returned to Colin’s mother’s house in France to recuperate. Naturally, this recovery is hampered.

July 12, 2010 With The Devil Amongst the Lawyers, the story of a beautiful young woman accused of killing her father, Sharyn McCrumb returns to the mountains of her Ballad series. Set in rural Virginia in 1935, this is as much an allegory of the contemporary media as the tale of a murder, however. The national press has descended on tiny Wise, Virginia, and the journalists are much more concerned with making the facts fit their own stories than with getting the details straight. McCrumb will discuss the book in four appearances across the state this week; find details in Events.

May 27, 2010 Nowhere, Carolina is the second novel in Tamara Leigh’s bestselling Southern Discomfort series, and while the book is overtly Christian in nature, more secular readers will enjoy the novel’s appealing and very human characters. Readers of chick-lit novels will see early on exactly where this book is going, and Christian chick lit is no different, except that it has less sex. Still, Tamara Leigh is able to throw in some curve balls and the story, while hopeful, is anything but pat.