Luna Howls at the Moon is Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s third middle-grade novel to feature a service dog as protagonist and narrator, a charming device that works well in this case to illustrate the value of pairing therapy animals with troubled children. Tubb will discuss the book at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 15.
Times are hard for the characters who populate William Gay’s Fugitives of the Heart, the last in a string of posthumous novels pieced together by his friends from an attic full of scenes Gay left behind. For J.M. White, Sonny Brewer, and the other writers who figured out how the scenes fit together, the effort was worth it, a forensic labor of love they feel even now for a writer who died in 2012.
Running through the core of Anjali Enjeti’s debut novel, The Parted Earth, is the volatile atmosphere of India’s Partition, a deadly era of violence that tore apart communities and families. Spanning generations and countries, the story examines the personal costs of starting over in the face of tragedy.
In the final pages of Southbound, Anjali Enjeti’s collection of essays on identity, race, and Southern politics, the author poses one simple but thorny question that looms like a ghost over much of the work: “Who am I?”
Set at a “divorce ranch” in Reno, Nevada, Julia Claiborne Johnson’s Better Luck Next Time describes the surprising, tender friendships that develop between two women looking to end their marriages and a young ranch hand who helps them transition to new lives.
In haunting lyric poems and traditional narratives, Jesse Graves’ Merciful Days shows us the ‘ghost-lives’ that shaped the boy learning the rough language of cows and that imprint the returning adult who walks the fence line now without his father. Graves talks with Chapter 16 about the experiences and influences that inform his work.
