Susan Beckham Zurenda’s new novel, The Girl from the Red Rose Motel, examines the challenges faced by high school lovers from opposite sides of the tracks in small-town South Carolina. Zurenda will be the keynote speaker for the 2024 Clarksville Writers Conference at Austin Peay State University on June 5-7.
With Colton Gentry’s Third Act, award-winning YA author Jeff Zentner tries his hand at adult contemporary romance with a Southern flair. Zentner will appear in conversation with Silas House and David Arnold at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 30.
In her 10th novel, After Annie, author Anna Quindlen starts things off with a bang: the shocking sudden death of the title character. Quindlen will discuss the book at Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 14.
In his novel The American Daughters, Maurice Carlos Ruffin tells the story of Adebimpe, known as Ady, a young, enslaved woman living in New Orleans just before the Civil War, and the underground network of powerful women to whom she is introduced. Ruffin will appear at Novel in Memphis on March 1 and The Bookshop in Nashville on April 18.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Divorce is an ugly business — at least it was for me. I felt as though everything in my life was broken: my home, my family, even my sanity. I didn’t know it then, but far from being over, my life was about to get interesting.
“I was afraid. Of pretty much everything. There were a hundred ways to die at Pearl Harbor,” admits 13-year-old Frank, the main character and narrator of Heroes: A Novel of Pearl Harbor, the latest in Alan Gratz’s series of action-packed historical novels for young readers. Gratz will appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on February 25.
