Southern Literary Fiction

Returning to characters introduced in her previous novel, acclaimed author Joanna Catherine Scott explores the terrain of a devastated South, where the war is over - but conflict lives on. Having endured years of hardship, Eugenia Mae Spotswood returns to Wilmington to find out who her mother is, only to be met with racism and hatred.... Until she is befriended by the most powerful Negro leader in the state Senate. Also driven forward are the strong-minded ex-slave Tom and his crippled former enemy Clyde Bricket.

Explore Southeast Texas in Seeds of Bliss, where humor, danger, and the faith of hometown hero Scott Mitchum come together in a thrilling Americana tale. Seeds of Bliss is about the East Texas town of Lyric, its triumphs and its struggles, and the people who are an integral part of it. The novel focuses on a hometown man, Scott Mitchum, and his daily goal to live out his faith in God, how he translates it into practical actions which he inoculates into his relationships and his will to survive and thrive. The story includes other characters who are positively influenced by Scott, and those ...

Joan was only a child the last time she visited Memphis. She doesn't remember the bustle of Beale Street on a summer's night. She doesn't know she's as likely to hear a gunshot ring out as the sound of children playing. How the smell of honeysuckle is almost overwhelming as she climbs the porch steps to the house where her mother grew up. But when the front door opens, she does remember Derek. This house full of history is home to the women of the North family.

In the years after World War II, the bleak yet beautiful plains of South Dakota still embody all the contradictions - the ruggedness and the promise - of the old frontier. This is a place where you can eat strawberries from wild vines, where lightning reveals a boundless horizon, where descendants of white settlers and native Indians continue to collide, and where, for most, there are limited options. René shares a home, a family, and a passion for dance with her older brother, Leon. Yet for all they have in common, their lives are on remarkably different paths.

A soldier wounded in the American Civil War, Inman turns his back on the carnage of the battlefield and begins the treacherous journey home to Cold Mountain - and to Ada, the woman he loved before the war began. As Inman attempts to make his way across the mountains, through the devastated landscape of a soon-to-be-defeated South, Ada struggles to make a living from the land her once-wealthy father left when he died. Neither knows if the other is still alive.

A Creole beauty. Eccentric sisters and a black rose. One granny woman and a red button. Church suppers and bingo nights. A poet out of his element. Dreams of Mexico. The shadowy world of thoroughbred horse racing. If the Creek Don't Rise is a collection of hard-used characters, tangled relationships, family angst, and fortitude. Eighteen tales and six vignettes make this collection a skillful and moving exploration of the commonplace, the hidden, and the unforgettable.

Self-educated and brown skinned, Cassie works full time in her grandmother's laundry in rural Mississippi. Illiterate and white, Judith falls for "colored music" and dreams of life as a big-city radio star. These teenage girls are half-sisters. And when they catch wind of their wayward father's inheritance coming down in Virginia, they hitch their hopes on a road trip together to claim what's rightly theirs. In an old junk car, with a frying pan, a ham, and a few dollars hidden in a shoe, they set off through the Deep South of the 1950s.

A psychological and dramatic tour de force from beloved international best-seller Sarah Waters. The year is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. In South London, in a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as Mrs Wray and her daughter Frances are obliged to take in lodgers. With the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, the routines of the house and the lives of its inhabitants will be shaken up in unexpected ways.

Take one disgraced District Attorney. Add a part-time philosopher—full-time barbecue grill master, a sassy but big-hearted waitress, a transexual stuck between genders on a pay-as-you-go plan, a mentally challenged woman who forgets which are swear words and which aren’t, and a mute Latino in the U.S. illegally, stir them together in a bucolic village on the coast of South Carolina, and you’ve got a recipe for insanity. Unrue delivers a saga of tragedy and redemption cocooned within biting social satire with Keseyian barbs and lush imagery…A worthy story told well…

In the moss-draped bayous of Caterwaul County, where secrets fester thicker than Spanish moss, a literary legend long presumed dead is resurrected with terrifying consequences. When a cache of Nullis Nemo Nusquama's lost manuscripts unleashes a feverish obsession in his devoted fans, fiction begins to bleed into reality. Jael Jewel, a woman wielding the South's charm like a weapon, knows the swamp's underbelly better than most. She enlists the help of N. N. Nusquama, pen name for her cousin, the volatile writer Cale, to weaponize the myth and cleanse their community of its violent ...

Today is Monday. The calls do not come as before. Weeks elapse between them, and when I answer the phone there is no overlap of voices, only my mother's. She spends much of the conversation avoiding mention of the pink elephant trumpeting in the middle of the room. The pink elephant would be my defection to Georgia. When I telephoned with the news of my imminent relocation, my father asked, "Georgia as in the Republic of Georgia by the Black Sea, or Georgia as in the Peach State?" He hoped I meant the former.

New South Africa emerged peacefully and full of hope after Apartheid. Yet life is looking desperate for one white family, struggling to survive. Martha, Hendrik and their daughter Magda are six months behind with their rent when they are finally asked to vacate their house in the quiet town of Wolseley. Selling their remaining things, they head to Cape Town, their last chance.

In the unforgiving wilds of colonial North Carolina, a preacher’s daughter learns that the most dangerous sins are born of compassion. The year is 1750, and for seventeen-year-old Sarah Mason, life is a quiet rhythm of scripture, duty, and the rigid expectations of her father’s flock in the small port of Moyock. Her world is bound by the laws of God and the unyielding authority of the British Crown, two forces she has never thought to question. But when a torrential storm casts a grievously wounded runaway slave named Joshua at the edge of her family’s land, Sarah’s world of ...

In West Texas in the summer of 1937, Cottonwood tells the story of two families thrown together by tragedy and the bounds of racial injustice. Sheriff Rube Whitlock is faced with raising his two young sons after the death of his infant daughter leaves his wife too grief stricken to care for them. Overwhelmed with the responsibility, Rube hires Esther, a local black woman whose husband has just purchased his second mule and ignited a stirring of dissonance and contempt within the usually quiet community.

In rural North Georgia two decades after the Civil War, 13-year-old Lulu Hurst reaches high into her father's bookshelf and pulls out an obscure book, The Truth of Mesmeric Influence. Deemed gangly and undesirable, Lulu wants more than a lifetime of caring for her disabled baby brother, Leo, with whom she shares a profound and supernatural mental connection.

Mr. Field wants a new life, a life cleansed of the old one’s disappointments. A concert pianist, his career is upended when the train he is travelling on crashes. On a whim, he buys a house that he hopes will make him happy. But as time passes, the house - which Le Corbusier designed as "a machine for living" - begins to have a disturbing effect on Mr. Field. When his wife inexplicably leaves him, Mr. Field can barely summon the will to search for her. Alone in the decaying house, he finds himself unglued from reality and possessed by a longing for a perverse kind of intimacy.

The tale of Billy Lee Turner, a 10-year-old boy convicted of the murder of a white girl in Mississippi in 1937, illuminates the monstrous face of racism in America with harrowing clarity and power. Narrated in the rich accents of the American South, Billy's story is told amid the picking fields and town streets, the heat, dust and poverty of the region in the time of the Depression.

Against a background of industrial unrest, misery, suspicion, jealousy, and the deaths of family and dear friends, the star-crossed love between mill owner John Thornton and the cultivated Margaret Hale is put to the test.

Dr. Frederick Eichner, world-renowned dermatologist, is visited by the entrancingly irritating Felix Treevly who comes to him as a patient and stays as an obsession. Prosaic incidents blossom into bizarre developments with the sharpened reality of dreams as the spectral Mr. Treevly leads the doctor into a series of increasingly weird situations. With the assistance of a drunken private detective, a mad judge, a car crash, a game show called What’s My Disease, and a hashish party, Treevly drives Eichner to madness and mayhem.

The wild places are where no one is looking anymore. Out there on the high plains, among the Sioux reservations and the silent buttes, among the small towns dying and the people with them, you can hear the wind. And on the back of the wind is the sound of an old accordion—tangos—mingling with the lonely thump of a single drum in the nighttime and a far-off warrior’s cry. On the back of the wind is the smell of worn saddle leather and sawdust, of sandalwood, and smoke from ancient ceremonial fires.