An unreliable narrator keeps readers guessing in Valerie Nieman’s In the Lonely Backwater
From the outset, it’s clear that young Maggie knows more than she’s saying about her cousin Charisse’s disappearance and murder in Valerie Nieman’s coming of age/suspense thriller In the Lonely Backwater.
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Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow takes its middle-aged heroine back to her teens
Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow is the touching and suspenseful story of a woman given the chance to relive her 16th birthday and make choices that have the power to change the course of her future. Straub will discuss the novel with Margaret Renkl at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 18.
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Unsparing honesty about grief fuels Charles Dodd White’s A Year Without Months
At the center of A Year Without Months — the compelling new memoir-in-essays by Knoxville writer Charles Dodd White — lies a brutal biographical fact: the suicides of White’s father, uncle, and son. From these events, White fashions a work of candor, compassion, and hard-won beauty. Charles Dodd White will discuss A Year Without Months at Dos Gatos Coffee (sponsored by Atlas Books) in Johnson City on May 19.
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Journalist Kathryn Miles trails a 1996 cold case
In Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders, Kathryn Miles sets out to find who killed Julie Williams and Lollie Winans in Shenandoah National Park more than 25 years ago. In doing so, she discovers problems with the justice system and persistent misogyny in outdoor culture.
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Her Country makes the case for a more inclusive country music industry
In Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be, Marissa R. Moss gets to the deep struggles women in country music have faced and argues for a more inclusive industry. Moss will discuss Her Country at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 10 and at the Tennessee State Museum on June 9.
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A family’s storytelling tradition hides and reveals a history of domestic abuse
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.
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