Fiction

August 15, 2013 By day, the hero of No Regrets, Coyote, a thriller by award-winning novelist John Dufresne, is a divorced therapist and amateur actor carrying on a platonic affair with his high-school sweetheart, whose husband thinks Coyote is gay. By night, he is a volunteer forensic consultant for the Everglades County Police Department, whose latest case involves the Christmas Eve massacre of a mother and three children and the subsequent suicide of their father. Or what looks like suicide. Dufresne will discuss No Regrets, Coyote at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on August 20, 2013, at 6 p.m.

August 6, 2013 Jill McCorkle’s novel Life After Life focuses on old age and death as way of seeing into the human heart. In this multi-layered narrative, death and loss are ever-present, and so is love. Jill McCorkle will read from and sign Life After Life at the twenty-fifth annual Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 11-13. All festival events are free and open to the public.

August 2, 2013 Perhaps it’s no wonder that Ace Atkins writes such believable thrillers: Atkins started his career as a crime reporter at The Tampa Tribune, where he earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination for investigative work. In 2011, the Robert B. Parker estate chose Atkins to continue the popular series featuring Parker’s beloved character Spenser, a Boston private investigator. Atkins will discuss Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland at the twenty-fifth annual Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 11-13. All festival events are free and open to the public.

August 1, 2013 Steve Yarbrough has earned a devoted readership for evocative, emotionally searing stories and novels about his native Mississippi. With The Realm of Last Chances, he turns to his adopted home state of Massachusetts, delivering a strikingly sensitive portrait of Kristin and Cal, an unlikely couple forced by the recession to move cross-country, and Matt, a young interloper whose own thwarted circumstances kindle a spiritual kinship with Kristin that becomes to each of them as necessary as it is doomed. Yarbrough will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville at 6:30 p.m. August 6, 2013.

July 30, 2013 The stories of three generations of hard-living, wife-leaving, dream-chasing musicians run through Long Gone Daddies, the debut novel by Memphis writer David Wesley Williams. A coming-of-age story, pilgrimage tale, and homage to the city of Memphis, Williams’s novel delivers a gritty saga in lyrical prose that swings from sly humor to despair with the gutsy style of a great blues song. He will appear at the twenty-fifth annual Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 11-13. All festival events are free and open to the public.