January 22, 2016 Burdy is Karen Spears Zacharias’ second novel based on Christian Bend, “a way-back place” in the mountains of East Tennessee. It features Burdy, one of the vividly-drawn characters of that tiny community, as she tracks down a townsman presumed dead after the Normandy invasion.
January 19, 2016 In My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout takes readers into the mind and heart of a woman who has survived a troubled childhood, revealing a spirit that is both beautiful and deeply wounded. Strout will appear at the Nashville Public Library on January 21, 2016.
January 12, 2016 Chris Bohjalian’s new novel, The Guest Room, brings the violence of the international sex trade to a well-to-do New York suburb, as a bachelor party becomes the scene of a bid for freedom by two young women held by Russian mobsters. Bohjalian will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis January 13, 2016.
January 7, 2016 In his novel West of Sunset, Stewart O’Nan imagines F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final years, a time when he tried to make a fresh start in Hollywood. O’Nan will appear at Crosstown Arts in Memphis on January 12, 2016, at 6 p.m.
January 5, 2016 In Only Love Can Break Your Heart, longtime Chapter 16 contributor Ed Tarkington hits many of the classic coming-of-age tale’s familiar notes, but the cast of characters and the rural Virginia town he populates in his accomplished debut are nothing less than singular. Tarkington will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 5, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
January 4, 2016 With the foolish, feverish urgency of a gambler betting all he has left on a longshot to win, I tried again, finishing another novel in less than a fifth of the time it had taken me to write the first one. There was a quick flurry of interest from editors but still no publishing deal. My agent—who had already sunk hundreds of hours into my career for nary a nickel, and hence will be my hero for life—remained hopeful. “I have a good feeling about this one,” she said. “Have faith.”
