May 24, 2011 For Marina Lucero, as for Sartre, hell is other people. Try as she might, Marina, heroine of Lorraine López’s new novel, The Realm of Hungry Spirits, can’t seem to wrench free of the gravitational pull of her family and friends. While she feels a kinship with the teachings of the Dalai Lama and Gandhi, her loved ones constantly challenge her efforts at greater compassion—sometimes with comic results.
May 18, 2011 It’s the rare novel that can detail horrific evil and still illuminate the best of the human spirit, turning a reader thoughtful, inward, almost spiritual. That’s what Chattanooga native Jane Bradley has managed to do with her new book You Believers, a heartbreaking narrative with a capacity for finding deliverance in the wake of a life devastated by evil. Bradley will sign copies of the book at 7 p.m. on May 19 at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Brentwood.
Lin Stepp,
Canterbury House Publishing
256 pages
$15.95
In this third book in Lin Stepp’s Smoky Mountain Novel series (after The Foster Girls and Tell Me About Orchard Hollow), a young woman with six foster children under the age of twelve hopes for patience, peace, and a bigger house–but love? Not hardly. Sometimes fate deals an unexpected hand.
–From the Publisher
May 5, 2011 In The Dashwood Sisters Tell All, the third Jane Austen-themed novel by Nashvillian Beth Pattillo, estranged sisters Ellen and Mimi Dodge take a Jane Austen walking tour to scatter their mother’s ashes. It is clear, even to them, that their mother’s final wish was designed to bring them closer together. The sisters doubt her plan will work, but as the week proceeds, they learn more about themselves, each other, their mother, and even some secrets about Jane Austen herself. Beth Pattillo will read from The Dashwood Sisters Tell All at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Brentwood on May 6 at 7 p.m.
April 25, 2011 Ann Patchett’s forthcoming novel, State of Wonder, features cannibals and snakes and a Heart of Darkness-like odyssey into an unknown world that leads inexorably to a confrontation with the protagonist’s past. It is thus unlike any other novel Patchett has ever written, and yet it has all the hallmarks of a Patchett novel, nonetheless: written in lucid, almost transparent prose, the new novel offers a page-turning tale about a set of characters who are intensely original and particular, but who are at the same time so recognizable as to be nearly universal. State of Wonder will be released on June 7, and Patchett will read from it on June 28 at the Nashville Public Library as part of the Salon@615 series. Today, Patchett talks candidly about the book and offers an exclusive excerpt for Chapter 16 readers.
April 25, 2011 In her forthcoming novel, State of Wonder, which hits shelves June 7, Nashville author Ann Patchett tells the story of Marina Singh, a researcher for a pharmaceutical company, who had trained to be an obstetrician, until a tragic mistake in the delivery room drove her from medicine. For more than a decade, she has tried to forget the botched C-section and the supervisor, Annick Swenson, who failed to come to her aid when the patient developed complications. But when the pharmaceutical company she works for sends Marina deep into the Amazon to find the elusive Dr. Swenson, who has spent the intervening years working in the jungle to develop a miracle fertility drug, Marina must confront both her long-feared professor and her understanding of her own past. In the following excerpt, Marina is on board a boat piloted by Easter, a deaf native child whom Annick Swenson has raised as a son. They are approaching the riverside village of the Lakashi, where the women of the tribe continue to bear children into old age.
