Fiction

One thing all nursing homes have in common is that no one really wants to be there—not the residents, not the employees, and not the visitors. It’s hard to imagine anything especially cheering or life-affirming happening in a nursing home, no matter how well it’s marketed. Novelist Todd Johnson doesn’t shy away from this desolation in The Sweet By and By, but he also shows how those at life’s end can still find meaning in their days. Johnson appears at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on April 13 at 6 p.m.

In Miss Julia Renews Her Vows, the eleventh book of the series, Ann B. Ross gives her heroine about all she can handle. And readers will love every page of the adventure. Ross will appear at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on April 9 at 7 p.m.

In the summer of 1910, the Charleston police arrested Daniel Cornelius “Nealy” Duncan, a black man, for the murder of a Jewish merchant. In spite of his court-appointed attorney’s Atticus Finch-like efforts, Duncan was found guilty by a kangaroo court and was hanged. By all accounts an upright citizen, Duncan was to be married five days after his alleged crime. He went to his grave calmly declaring his innocence. In Dead Weight, former CBS News producer Batt Humphreys fills the gaps in Duncan’s story. By turns a romance, mystery, courtroom drama, and history lesson, Dead Weight makes the most of its exhaustive research and Humphreys’ seemingly natural ability to spin a nail-biting yarn.

Brad Watson‘s new collection, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, returns to the post-Faulkner, post-modern South of bleak strip malls, cheap motels, tacky Gulf Coast beaches, and lonely outposts surrounded by murky water, the faint odor of decay, and the ever-present specters of longing and loss. But despite the well-known milieu, these new stories demonstrate a mastery of the surreal that lifts them above the typical conventions of Southern Gothic. Brad Watson will be at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on March 30.