Book Reviews

Multimedia artist Jessica Ingram, who grew up in Nashville, commemorates acts of resistance to segregation and white supremacist terror in Road Through Midnight. The book includes her photographs of sites scarred by racial violence, as well as interviews with victims’ families and journalists who covered the crimes.

When we first meet Knox Thompson, the protagonist in Wesley Browne’s astounding debut novel Hillbilly Hustle, he’s a 40-something, slightly overweight nobody, planning to make a quick cash haul at a backroom poker game. As he soon learns, the best-laid plans often go awry. Browne will discuss the book at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on April 3.

The heroine of Lily King’s fifth novel, Writers & Lovers, is 31 years old, deeply in debt, and living in a potting shed, but she won’t let her writing dream die.

Ariel Lawhon’s Code Name Hélène, an exhaustively researched and vividly woven historical novel, introduces readers to unsung WWII heroine Nancy Wake, who led a thousand French Resistance fighters, became a critical Allied asset, and eluded the Nazis so effectively that she inspired the nickname “The White Mouse.”

Leesa Cross-Smith’s new book of short fiction, So We Can Glow, feels like a radical act of joy. On the whole, the collection is a sexy, impressionistic feast of feminine energy and agency.