My Favorite Chapter
It’s been more than 10 years since I took those tentative and unwitting steps toward a part-time career as a “professional writer,” a label I never would have dared apply to myself until Margaret Renkl gave me permission.
Defining One’s Place in the World
When a young woman’s estranged father is found dead, her investigation into a seemingly insignificant vintage map in his possession leads her down a path fraught with riddles, conspiracies, secrets, and lies. Peng Shepherd’s The Cartographers is an otherworldly thriller that will appeal to fans of V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library.
Stories More Like Memories
The Crocodile Bride, the debut novel by Ashleigh Bell Pedersen, is a gripping family saga about the power of storytelling — especially its ability to warm and soften the edges of cold, harsh reality. Pedersen creates a world at once tragic and beautiful, violent and magical, desperately impoverished yet rich in meaning.
The Promise of a Person
In The Storyteller, the new YA novel by Kathryn Williams, 17-year-old Jess pretends to be someone she’s not when she’s around her boyfriend and his friends. But when she uncovers new evidence regarding the mysterious fate of the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, Jess is forced to delve deeper into the meaning of identity — and the cost of deception.
Stories Connect Us
Geographies of the Heart, the first novel from Knoxville writer Caitlin Hamilton Summie, depicts a close-knit Midwestern family over 25 years as they weather the daily trials and losses of life with quiet dignity.
A Single Drop of Blood
In We Were Kings, the latest YA novel from Court Stevens, 18-year-old Nyla and her new friend, Sam, race against time to solve a decades-old cold case and save the life of a woman they believe to be wrongfully imprisoned for the crime. Stevens will discuss We Were Kings with Sharon Cameron at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 9.
