Fiction

October 5, 2015 The narrator of Geraldine Brooks’s The Secret Chord faces a formidable task: an order from King David to write an unvarnished chronicle of the flawed man behind the crown. Geraldine Brooks will discuss The Secret Chord at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 9-11, 2015.

October 1, 2015 In Tom Piazza’s new novel, A Free State, a runaway slave, Henry Sims, joins a troupe of minstrels in blackface, but for Henry the only possible freedom comes from the liberating power of music. Piazza will discuss A Free State at Crosstown Arts in Memphis on October 8, 2015, and at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 9-11, 2015.

September 29, 2015 Claire Vaye Watkins’s stunning new novel, Gold Fame Citrus, imagines an utterly drought-ravaged California and the perilous options that remain for escape. Watkins will appear at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 9-11, 2015.

September 25, 2015 Matthew Guinn has created a rich, realistic portrait of Atlanta in 1881 for his new thriller, The Scribe, which features detective Thomas Canby, the target of a Reconstruction-era corruption charge, who must return to his native Atlanta to track down a serial killer. Guinn will discuss The Scribe at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on September 29, 2015, at 6:30 p.m., and at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 9-11, 2015.

September 23, 2015 Every so often, the Pisgah County Police Department reopens the cold case that is colder than any other: the 1989 murder of ten-year-old Teresa Ewing. And when they do, it turns the lives of the people who were once her friends into a nightmare. Sallie Bissell will discuss the latest book in her Mary Crow series, A Judgment of Whispers, at BookManBookWoman in Nashville on October 3, 2015, at 3 p.m.