Tina Chambers

May 31, 2013 Raymond L. Atkins’s third novel and winner of the 2011 Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction, Camp Redemption, tells the story of Early Willingham, a mild-mannered mechanic with a fondness for Schlitz malt liquor, and his clairvoyant sister, Ivey. Filled with colorful characters and quaint locales, Camp Redemption is a gentle comic meditation on the surprising things that can happen when we reach out a hand to those in need. Raymond L. Atkins will discuss the novel at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on June 6, 2013, at 5:30 p.m.

April 16, 2013 When Georgy Daniilovich Jachmenev impulsively steps in front of a bullet meant for the Tsar’s cousin, he is rewarded by being whisked from his miserable existence in the squalid village of Kashin to the glorious Winter Palace of Tsar Nicholas II during the last days of the centuries-old Romanov dynasty. John Boyne will discuss The House of Special Purpose—a novel of love, regret, and nearly unbearable loss—at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 24 at 6:30 p.m.

March 13, 2013 Cary Holladay’s lyrical new collection of linked stories, Horse People, follows various members of a prosperous family in Orange County, Virginia, from the Civil War through World War II and beyond. Holladay crafts small, intimate portraits of her characters as they confront timeless themes of birth and death, compassion and cruelty, memory and loss, and the many guises of both cowardice and courage. She will read from and sign copies of Horse People at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on March 22 at 5:30 p.m., and in Buttrick Hall, Room 101, on the Vanderbilt University campus in Nashville on March 28 at 7 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public.