Seventeen-year-old Stella Bohdan is a medium in 1912 New York City who finds her connection to the spirit world a dubious distinction: “I am never alone, never, and yet I’m the loneliest person I know, dead or alive,” Stella complains in The Spiritualists, the debut YA novel by Kristin O’Donnell Tubb. The author will appear at Bound Booksellers in Franklin on June 6 and Ernest Tubb Record Shop in Nashville on June 11.
Three recent poetry collections — Ian Hall’s Creekwater Mansions, Gaylord Brewer’s Goodbye, Baby, and Rachel Landrum Crumble’s In Praise of Detours — give voice to times of turbulence and upheaval.
A Fortune of Sand, the lively debut adult novel by bestselling YA author Ruta Sepetys, dives into the wealth, glamour, and corruption of 1920s Detroit. Sepetys will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 26.
Joe Bond’s troubled teens come alive in real and heartrending ways in his debut novel, Hope House.
In On Witness and Respair, a collection of essays and speeches, Jesmyn Ward deals with beauty and ugliness, dread and hope. Ward will discuss the book at Fisk University in Nashville on May 18.
Leslie Baird’s debut novel, Salomé, offers a genre-defying tale: a bildungsroman wrapped in layers of intrigue, gothic mysticism, and a reimagined classic femme fatale. Set in the quiet French village of Châteaubriant, it’s a mind-bendingly good read. Leslie Baird will discuss the book at The Lipstick Lounge in Nashville on May 26 at 6 p.m.
