Fiction

July 19, 2012 In Tom Franklin’s latest novel, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter—the novel’s title is derived from an old method for teaching elementary school students how to spell Mississippi—simultaneously paradisiacal and perilous forests form the thematic center of a compelling literary thriller that skillfully blends the conventions of crime fiction with sensitive examinations of Faulkner Country’s inescapable concerns: race, love, family secrets, and the twin demons of longing and regret. Franklin will discuss Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter at the twenty-fourth annual Southern Festival of Books, held October 12-14, 2012, at Legislative Plaza in Nashville. All events are free and open to the public.

July 18, 2012 Chris Cleave’s second novel, Little Bee enjoyed enormous critical and popular success. A devastatingly emotional but immensely readable tale about a young Nigerian refugee and a suburban London woman whose lives are drawn together by happenstance, Little Bee became a surprise hit, largely due to word of mouth. The novel has over two million copies in print and is being developed into a film by Nicole Kidman. Now, with Gold, his sweeping new novel about an intense competition between two Olympic cyclists, Cleave is poised to repeat that success. He will discuss and sign copies of Gold on July 24 at 6:15 p.m. as part of the Salon@615 series at the Nashville Public Library. The event is free and open to the public.

June 20, 2012 The war is over, Lincoln has been assassinated, all slaves are officially free, and the South is in turmoil: with so many hopes and expectations, so many frustrations and resentments, this is fertile ground in which to plant a novel. In Freeman, Leonard Pitts Jr. makes the most of this setting’s potential for conflict. The book’s main characters include Sam Freeman, a self-educated former slave who escaped to the North fifteen years earlier and is now determined to go back and find his wife; and Prudence Cafferty Kent, a privileged young war widow from Boston with a plan to educate former slaves in the South.