Southern Literary Fiction

1980, Pass Christian, Mississippi: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His divelight illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flightbag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how?

As the 1980s draw to a close, South Africa is a maelstrom of political violence with the apartheid regime in its death throes. Young Martin Helger is the struggling odd duck at an elite private boys school in Johannesburg, with his father, a rough-handed scrap dealer, and his brother, a mysterious legend. When a beautiful and manipulative American arrives at the family home, Martin soon finds himself wrenched out of his isolated bubble and thrust into the raw heart of the struggle.

In Alyssa Richards’s break-out new novel, a woman who trusts no one has to believe someone—but a shocking finale will turn everything upside down. After running from her past for so long, Harper Brown is finally in a good place. She’s renovating a beautiful old home in Savannah, has lined up a dream job appraising Civil War antiquities, and is falling in love with the debonair Nick Chamberlain. Most importantly, her anxiety and paranoia are finally under control. But when she sees a vision of her sister shrouded in fog in the square across the street, Harper’s carefully assembled ...

With the meteoric success of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus placed himself among America’s most original and emotionally engaged storytellers. If his first comic novel mapped the late nineteenth-century South, Local Souls brings the twisted hilarity of Flannery O’Connor kicking into our new century.

Suspended in a strangely modern-day version of limbo, the young man at the center of Russell Banks’s uncompromising and morally complex new novel must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration. Known in his new identity only as the Kid, and on probation after doing time for a liaison with an underage girl, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to live within 2,500 feet of anywhere children might gather. With nowhere else to go, the Kid takes up residence under a south Florida causeway, in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders.

In crisp, unembellished prose, Eunyoung Choi paints intimate portraits of the lives of young women in South Korea, balancing the personal with the political. In the title story, a fraught friendship between an exchange student and her host sister follows them from adolescence to adulthood. In "A Song from Afar", a young woman grapples with the death of her lover, traveling to Russia to search for information about the deceased. In "Secret", the parents of a teacher killed in the Sewol ferry sinking hide the news of her death from her grandmother.

Late September 1957. Henry and Effie, very young newlyweds from Georgia, arrive in Cape May, New Jersey, for their honeymoon only to find the town is deserted. Feeling shy of each other and isolated, they decide to cut the trip short. But before they leave, they meet a glamorous set of people who sweep them up into their drama. The empty beach town becomes their playground, and as they sneak into abandoned summer homes, go sailing, walk naked under the stars, make love, and drink a great deal of gin, Henry and Effie slip from innocence into betrayal, with irrevocable consequences.

“It’s like living in a black-and-white photo that keeps fading in the sun. Only we’re fading with it.” —After Color From celebrated artist Malaika Favorite, winner of the Cosmographia Books Prize for Spiritual Fiction, comes a mesmerizing story told in luminous prose that makes readers feel the wonder—and terror—of seeing color in a colorless world. In 2020, humanity lost the ability to see color. Over the next thirty years, society rebuilt itself in shades of gray. But on an autumn morning in Atlanta, 2052, fifteen-year-old Jade Kelly perceives the impossible: a single red ...

Based on a true story, this debut Civil War novel follows a Southern plantation woman's journey of transforming her home into a hospital for the war. This debut novel is based on the true story of Carrie McGavock. During the Civil War's Battle of Franklin, a five-hour bloodbath with 9,200 casualties, McGavock's home was turned into a field hospital where four generals died. For 40 years she tended the private cemetery on her property where more than 1,000 were laid to rest.

Having justly earned her reputation as a master storyteller, Lee Smith's name evokes images of authentic country folk struggling through life's arduous tests. Saving Grace adds a stunning spiritual dimension. The daughter of a preacher who ignores his destitute family, Florida Grace doesn't think much of Jesus. He's the reason she's lived in squalor and He wasn't there for her through her failed marriage. But in one shining moment He calls out to her and she returns to her roots to heed His call.

Attention fans of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood! Here's a lively multigenerational tale of a family of charming, unforgettable Southern women, a story of love and laughter, pain and redemption that you are sure to treasure.

In 1989, Jodi McCarty is 17 years old when she's sentenced to life in prison. When she's released 18 years later, she finds herself at a Greyhound bus stop, reeling from the shock of unexpected freedom but determined to chart a better course for herself. Not yet able to return to her lost home in the Appalachian Mountains, she heads south in search of someone she left behind, as a way of finally making amends. There, she meets and falls in love with Miranda, a troubled young mother living in a motel room with her children. Together they head toward what they hope will be a fresh start.

The third installment of the John Pickett series of humorous Regency mysteries finds Bow Street Runner Pickett in Scotland investigating a woman found unconscious on the beach - a woman who bears a striking resemblance to the local laird's daughter, a girl missing and presumed dead for the last 15 years. Pickett is surprised to discover that the woman was found by none other than Lady Fieldhurst and her three young nephews - and gratified to learn that her ladyship has registered at the seaside inn as Mrs. Julia Pickett.

Lily has grown up believing she accidentally killed her mother when she was four. She not only has her own memory of holding the gun, but her father's account of the event. Now 14, she yearns for her mother, and for forgiveness. Living on a peach farm in South Carolina with her father, she has only one friend: Rosaleen, a black servant whose sharp exterior hides a tender heart. South Carolina in the '60s is a place where segregation is still considered a cause worth fighting for. When racial tension explodes one summer afternoon, and Rosaleen is arrested and beaten, Lily is compelled to act.

When Julia, Lady Fieldhurst, returns from Scotland restless and out of sorts, her friend Emily Dunnington plans a select dinner party with half a dozen male guests from whom Julia may choose a lover.

But Emily's dinner ends in disaster when one of her guests, Sir Reginald Montague, is shot dead.

In the second volume of the Southern Reach Trilogy, questions are answered, stakes are raised, and mysteries are deepened.… Following the disastrous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the second book of the Southern Reach trilogy introduces John Rodriguez, the new head of the government agency responsible for the safeguarding of Area X. His first day is spent grappling with the fall-out from the last expedition. Area X itself remains a mystery.

As far as everyone in the squad room knows, Ben Halloran is completely fresh to the streets of the 77th Division - just a soft kid from the West Side who's decided to become a cop and happened to draw the hardest neighborhood in LA. But demons from Ben's complicated past catch up with him and his tough, oddly principled Daryl Gates-era partner, Miguel Marquez, all too quickly. From the moment Ben and Marquez hit the streets together, they're pulled into a web of ultra-violent corruption and retribution.

The highly anticipated third volume of the haunting, disturbing, and evocative Southern Reach trilogy.It is winter in Area X. A new team embarks across the border, on a mission to find a member of a previous expedition who may have been left behind. As they press deeper into the unknown, navigating new terrain and new challenges, the threat to the outside world becomes only more daunting. In this last instalment of the Southern Reach Trilogy, the mysteries of Area X may have been solved.

Sarah Walters is a less-than-perfect debutante. She tries hard to follow the time-honored customs of the Charleston Camellia Society, as her mother and grandmother did, standing up straight in cotillion class and attending lectures about all the things that Camellias don't do. (Like ride with boys in pickup trucks).But Sarah can't quite ignore the barbarism just beneath all that propriety, and as soon as she can she decamps South Carolina for a life in New York City.

Growing up in the suburbs in postwar Japan, it seemed to Hajime that everyone but him had brothers and sisters. His sole companion was Shimamoto, also an only child. Together they spent long afternoons listening to her father's record collection. But when his family moved away, the two lost touch. Now Hajime is in his 30s. After a decade of drifting he has found happiness with his loving wife and two daughters and success running a jazz bar. Then Shimamoto reappears.