Fiction

Charles Frazier’s Varina returns to the era of Cold Mountain but focuses on the Southern elite who bear the historical burden of instigating the Civil War. Frazier will discuss Varina, in conversation with novelists Paula McLain and Ann Patchett, at the Nashville Public Library on May 14.

Karen Spears Zacharias’s Christian Bend is the final novel in a trilogy set in the small East Tennessee community of the same name. It adds new characters and plot twists to the major issues set up in the first two novels, Mother of Rain and Burdy.

A fallen policeman’s survivors confront their grief and rearrange their lives in Leesa Cross-Smith’s debut novel, Whiskey & Ribbons. The author will speak at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 6.

In The Fighter, Michael Farris Smith’s latest tale of human struggle in the Mississippi Delta, brawler Jack Boucher is drowning in debt, dodging enemies, and losing the battle against his own fractured memory. Smith will appear at Novel in Memphis on April 16, and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 17.

Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles, is back with Circe, another brilliant revamp of tales and characters drawn from Homeric poetry. Miller will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 11.