July 3, 2013 Set against a backdrop of explosive civil-rights unrest, Susan Crandall’s Whistling Past the Graveyard follows nine-year-old Starla, who is white, and Eula, a young black woman who has stolen an abandoned white infant, on a strange odyssey that will challenge everything they believe about themselves and the people they love, and change their lives forever, if they manage to survive. Susan Crandall will appear at the Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on July 12, 2013, at 6 p.m., and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on July 13, 2013, at 6:30 p.m. She will be joined at Parnassus by novelist Karen White.

July 2, 2013 “Standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me. Had you told me that I was seven again, I might have half-believed you, for a moment,” says the adult narrator of the new novel by fantasy-master Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. He is recalling a three-week school holiday in Sussex when he was seven years old, and the strange events that transpired—events both unforgettable and near-impossible to remember. Gaiman will appear at the War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville on July 10 as part of the Salon@615 series. This will be Gaiman’s final author tour. Tickets are $30 and include a copy of the book. Click here for complete ticketing information.