Emily Choate

January 13, 2015 Regina Mary Robichard, the determined young NAACP lawyer at the center of Deborah Johnson’s The Secret of Magic, finds herself deeply drawn to the case of a brutal murder in segregation-era Mississippi. Investigating, she enters a world of both racial conflict and magical surprise. Deborah Johnson will discuss The Secret of Magic at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 17, 2015, at 2 p.m.

November 10, 2014 In Garth Stein’s new novel, A Sudden Light, fourteen-year-old Trevor and his father head west during a time of family crisis. In a fight over the fate of Riddell House, the crumbling mansion built from their family’s timber fortune, conflicting agendas of both the dead and the living come to light. Stein, the bestselling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain, will discuss A Sudden Light at the Nashville Public Library on November 14, 2014, at 6:15 p.m.

October 28, 2014 Ron Rash has achieved wide recognition as a masterful craftsperson, and Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories will seal that reputation. This collection, drawn from more than twenty years of stories set in the Southern Appalachians, confirms Rash as that landscape’s foremost literary mapmaker and guide. Ron Rash will discuss Something Rich and Strange at The Skillery in Nashville on November 4, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.

October 14, 2014 When Jesse’s father gets thrown out of the Methodist ministry in the early seventies, her family enters the vagabond spiritual path so prominent in that era, and Jesse negotiates her awkward ride into adolescence through encounters with her semi-transient neighbors. Darcey Steinke will discuss her new novel, Sister Golden Hair, at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on October 16, 2014, at 5:30 p.m.

September 8, 2014 A novel with enormous scope and an ambitious time-jumping structure, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven paints its post-apocalyptic world in both bold brushstrokes and tiny points of background detail. Mandel will discuss Station Eleven at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on Oct. 10-12.

August 26, 2014 The four friends at the center of Nickolas Butler’s debut novel, Shotgun Lovesongs, teeter between nostalgia for the young guys they once were and hopes for the men they will become. Now in their mid-thirties, they have begun to feel the weight of the choices they’ve already made. Nickolas Butler will discuss Shotgun Lovesongs at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 10-12, 2014. All festival events are free and open to the public.