Southern Literary Fiction

Pauline Smith, a retired insurance processor, is comfortable in her habits and her home. She is a born worrier with strong opinions and believes in family taking care of family. When her mother is injured in a fall, Pauline and her sister Perk must move Mama from their childhood home in Roanoke, Virginia to an assisted living complex in Richmond, where they live. As she is confronted with her mother's frail health, Pauline struggles to confront her own fear of death and the grief she's harbored since her father died when she was a child.

Marvin Spangler is a self-centered, ill-equipped teacher of high school history, tasked by his principal to form an auctioneering team that has a chance in hell of winning a Tennessee state championship. He assembles a team comprising three very different souls: Larry Jr., the damaged prodigy, is led by fate; Eric, the obsessed jock, by unrequited love; and Helen, the usually disinterested beauty, by an inexplicable fascination. Together they surrender to a journey that carries them to the cusp of the summit of their dreams...and the nightmares awaiting far down below.

Sometimes wishes come true. Known as an unquiet, discontent girl, Madeline Becquerel dreams of travel to exciting places. A colonial girl with ideas ahead of her time. And a longing for something more than being trapped in her family’s country home. Psychologist Wyatt Guillory is a modern man summoned to find his missing sister. Though he is a psychologist, firmly grounded in the present, he soon comes to question reality as he knows it. When a mysterious man shows up in her home, Madeline finds herself drawn to the unattainable. And traveling becomes something so much more than she ever ...

The last thing Sandy Coker needs is love. In the 1990s, she's one of very few women tapped by the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department to be a lead inspector in the lonesome, cutthroat world of heavy construction. Contractors she minds are transforming the rugged Ozarks and driving new interstate through mountains, treacherous and wild. She holds the key to millions of dollars in compensation for work that can cost not only livelihoods, but lives. When she meets dirt foreman Wayne Sheridan of Missouri, stars collide and, for both of them, the timing could not be worse.

When March Briscoe returns to East Texas two years after he was caught having an affair with his brother's wife, the Briscoe family becomes once again the talk of the small town of Olympus. His mother, June, hardly welcomes him back with open arms. Her husband's own past affairs have made her tired of being the long-suffering spouse. Is it, perhaps, time for a change? Within days of March's arrival, someone is dead, marriages are upended, and even the strongest of alliances are shattered. In the end, the ties that hold them together might be exactly what drag them all down.

Washed in the Water: Tales from the South offers vignettes of folks living the best they know how as they reach out for redemption. Set between 1950 and 1980, each tale stares at an individual as unique as the humid landscape of the South. Hard lives, daily survival, and lessons about getting on with the business of living reverberate among the characters.

Leaving behind them a Europe still taking stock after the definitive battle of Waterloo, Jack Aubrey and his friend Stephen Maturin set sail for Chile. But even with the newly minted peace, life at sea remains beset with danger and imminent disaster, and the political turmoil of the South American continent is equal to any threat they have yet faced.

London, 1807: William Thornhill makes a mistake for which he and his family are made to pay dearly. His sentence: to be transported to New South Wales. The Thornhills arrive in a harsh and alien land that they do not understand. When William claims a hundred acres for himself, he is shocked to find Aboriginal people already living on it - and that other recent arrivals are finding their own ways to respond to them. Soon William has to make the most difficult decision of his life.

Cain’t Do Nothing with Love was the winner of the CIPA EVVY Audio Book Award 2014. All stories treat the most difficult topics - death, religion, family - with sharp humor and urgent respect.

Jean Louise Finch, dite "Scout", l'inoubliable héroïne de "Ne tirez pas sur l'oiseau moqueur", est de retour dans sa petite ville natale de l'Alabama, Maycomb, pour rendre visite à son père, Atticus. Vingt ans ont passé. Nous sommes au milieu des années 1950, et la nation se déchire autour des questions raciales. Confrontée à la société qui l'a façonnée mais dont elle croit s'être affranchie en partant vivre à New York, Jean Louise va découvrir ses proches sous un jour inédit...

As America recovers from the Second World War, two families’ journeys begin. James Vincent, born in 1942 to an Irish American family, escapes his parents’ turbulent marriage and attends law school in New York, where he moves up the social ladder as a prosperous and bright attorney. Meanwhile, Agnes Miller, a beautiful black woman on a date with a handsome suitor, is pulled over by the police on a rural road in Georgia. The terrible moments that follow make her question her future and pivot her into a hasty marriage and new life in the Bronx.

Jo and Bethie Kaufman were born into a world full of promise. Growing up in 1950s Detroit, they live in a perfect 'Dick and Jane' house, where their roles in the family are clearly defined. Jo is the tomboy, the bookish rebel with a passion to make the world more fair; Bethie is the pretty, feminine good girl, a would-be star who enjoys the power her beauty confers and dreams of a traditional life.

Her family was to be her legacy, until an angry mob murdered her only son.

The Path of Light is a collection of short stories nothing if not a mirror to the phenomenal range of human behavior. Taken from the Upanishads to the Jatakas to South Asian folklore, these simple but contemplative tales reveal how people are capable of both extreme cruelty and inordinate kindness.