“Had I changed us, made us friends, would I have turned his fate?” asks Leah Gavin, the narrator of Sheri Joseph’s novel Angels at the Gate. Loosely based on the author’s time at the University of the South in the 1980s, Joseph says the story is “about the thrill of creating oneself in youth and the paths taken and not taken that lead to regret.”
In The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War, Tom Zoellner examines a little known but crucial driver of emancipation — the actions of enslaved people who fled their owners and forged their own destinies.
Dead Man Blues, a crime novel by S.D. House (pen name of bestselling author Silas House), combines a mysterious murder with the tale of a man in search of redemption.
With Gone Before Goodbye, Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben combine forces to introduce readers to Maggie McCabe, a world-class reconstructive surgeon who finds herself entangled in a web of intrigue and lies. The authors will discuss the book at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville on October 29, with Ann Patchett moderating.
In Chet Atkins: Mr. Guitar, Don Cusic makes the case for the East Tennessee-born musician, producer, and record-label executive as the emblematic guitarist of the 20th century. Don Cusic will appear at the 2025 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 18-19.
In Archive of Unknown Universes, Ruben Reyes Jr.’s characters use a computing device to explore alternative versions of El Salvador’s civil war and their own turbulent romances. Ruben Reyes Jr. will appear at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 18-19.
