Home-Run Shoot-Out
February 12, 2014 North Carolina-based author Wiley Cash garnered widespread praise for his 2012 debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, which explored a small town’s dark secret through multiple narrators. He returns to the technique in his new novel, This Dark Road to Mercy, a short, gripping thriller in which the action unfolds via four very different voices, against the backdrop of the 1998 home-run race between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire. Cash will discuss and sign This Dark Road to Mercy at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on February 17, 2014, at 6 p.m.
February 11, 2014 Set against the rich and tragic backdrop of World War I, Anita Shreve’s newest novel, Stella Bain, traces her protagonists’s attempt to piece together her true life and the events leading up to the desperate, shell-shocked state in which wakes. Anita Shreve will discuss Stella Bain at Parnassus Books on February 13, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.
February 10, 2014 A story of love, betrayal, and the gaping hole left in a family by the unresolved disappearance of a loved one, Laura Lippman’s After I’m Gone is a reminder that a well-done mystery novel is as great a work of art as any piece of literature. Lippman will discuss After I’m Gone at the Nashville Public Library on February 12, 2014, at 6:15 p.m., as part of the 
January 30, 2014 “Elspeth Howell was a sinner.” Thus begins James Scott’s harrowing debut novel, The Kept, in which Elspeth is made to pay a hefty price for her sins: after a long foot journey through snow, she returns home to find her husband and four of her five children murdered. Rendered in delicate, measured prose that makes the unfolding of weighty truths and painful discoveries all the more resonant, The Kept is a provocative hybrid of period suspense thriller and domestic literary novel. James Scott will appear in conversation with Jamie Quatro at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 3, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.
January 29, 2014 In Still Life with Bread Crumbs, the new novel by Pulitzer Prizewinner Anna Quindlen, Rebecca Winter is famous for a single photograph she took years earlier. But fame doesn’t pay the bills indefinitely, and Rebecca sets out to find new inspiration in some unlikely places. Quindlen will discuss the book on February 5, 2014, at 6:15 p.m. in Ingram Hall at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The event, part of the Salon@615 series, is free and open to the public.
January 28, 2014 Threadgill Pickett, the 114-year-old protagonist of Charles McNair’s novel Pickett’s Charge, is the last surviving Confederate soldier. Roused from his Alabama rest home by a mysterious visitation from his long-dead brother, Threadgill sets out on a long trek to Bangor, Maine, where he plans to kill the last surviving Union solider. Absurdity and tragedy follow Threadgill wherever he goes, and revenge begins to seem a tougher, stranger business than he’d anticipated. McNair will appear at Howlin’ Books in Nashville on January 30, 2014, at 6 p.m.