16 of the latest fiction, memoirs and short story collections from authors across the South.
OUT NOW
Black in Blues by Imani Perry
Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways. Blue skies and blue water offer hope for that which lies beyond the current conditions. But blue is also the color of deep melancholy and heartache, echoing Louis Armstrong’s question, “What did I do to be so Black and blue?” In this book, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world’s favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural and spiritual journey—an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology. Perry traces both blue and Blackness from their earliest roots to their many embodiments of contemporary culture, drawing deeply from her own life as well as art and history.
Junie by Erin Crosby Eckstine
Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. Her daydreams are filled with poetry and faraway worlds, while she spends her nights secretly roaming through the forest, consumed with grief over the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie. When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, she commits a desperate act—one that rouses Minnie’s spirit from the grave, tethered to this world unless Junie can free her. She enlists the aid of Caleb, the guests’ coachman, and their friendship soon becomes something more. Yet as long-held truths begin to crumble, she realizes Bellereine is harboring dark and horrifying secrets that can no longer be ignored. With time ticking down, Junie begins to push against the harsh current that has controlled her entire life.
Some Other Time by Angela Brown
The next step in Ellie Baker’s marriage: divorce. She and her husband, Jonah, are heading to Florida to break it to the family. No great drama to share. After 20 years of marriage, they’ve just fallen out of love. Simple. Not to their college-age daughter, Maggie, who is devastated. Or to Ellie’s father, Frank, who grows as cold as a retiree can get in Orlando. As for Ellie’s mother, Bunny: no, no, no. She doesn’t want to hear it. After a dreadful weekend, Ellie and Jonah return home to New Jersey with hearts and minds still set on a split. Until the extraordinary morning Ellie wakes up to an alternate version of the present day—one in which she, and a passing stranger named Jonah, never married. Over the span of an inexplicable week, Ellie sees how her world—and the world of everyone she loves—unfolded through a different course in time. And this time could change everything all over again.
Soaked: Stories by Toby LeBlanc
One word describes Louisiana 50 years from now after climate change intensifies: Soaked. A nearly silent Cajun man is the last speaker of Louisiana French but doesn’t know what he is saying. A Vietnamese woman recovering from the trauma of war looks for home in a hurricane. A farmer gambles his inherited land on the best marijuana Louisiana has ever known. Laughing in the face of oblivion, lending a hand to the hopeless, adapting in spite of tragedy and enduring when everything else is gone, is what the people of Louisiana, Toby LeBlanc’s people, do best.
White Visiting Babette by Kat Meads
Ina adores Babette and visits her cousin regularly in whichever facility Babette currently resides. She trusts Babette’s take on all things and has since childhood (orphans cannot afford to be squeamish), but on Tuesday’s visit, to her grave detriment, Ina fails to follow Babette’s advice when an “incident” throws all in chaos. A one-way Alice in Wonderland, Ina now lives in Babette’s world of lockdowns, barred windows, displaced ducks, mashed potatoes, plays told as stories and stories told as plays, perpetual cleaning, howls in the night and far too many windows. Staying sane isn’t as simple as it seems. Meads is a Deep South Southern Voice author. You can find her work here.
OUT IN MARCH
Firstborn Girls by Bernice L. McFadden
On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died in a car crash near Detroit, only to be resuscitated after her mother pulled her from the flaming wreckage. Firstborn Girls traces her remarkable life from that moment up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar. Growing up in 1980s Brooklyn, Bernice finds solace in books, summer trips to Barbados and boarding school to escape her alcoholic father. Discovering the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, she finally sees herself and her loved ones reflected in their stories of “messy, beautiful, joyful Black people.” Interwoven with Bernice’s personal journey is her family’s history, beginning with her four-times enslaved great-grandmother Louisa Vicey Wilson in 1822 Hancock County, Georgia. Her descendants survived Reconstruction and Jim Crow, joined the Great Migration and mourned Dr. King’s assassination during the Civil Rights Movement. These women’s wisdom, secrets and fierce love are passed down like Louisa’s handmade quilt.
The Jackal’s Mistress by Chris Bohjalian
Virginia, 1864—Libby Steadman’s husband has been away for so long that she can barely conjure his voice in her dreams. While she longs for him in the night, fearing him dead in a Union prison camp, her days are spent running a gristmill with her teenage niece, a hired hand and his wife, all the grain they can produce requisitioned by the Confederate Army. It’s an uneasy life in the Shenandoah Valley, the territory frequently changing hands, control swinging back and forth like a pendulum between North and South, and Libby awakens every morning expecting to see her land a battlefield. When she finds a gravely injured Union officer left for dead in a neighbor’s house, Libby must make a terrible decision: Does she leave him to die alone? Or does she risk treason and try to nurse him back to health?
Boy With Wings by Mark Mustian
What does it mean to be different? When Johnny Cruel is born with strange appendages on his back in the 1930s South, the locals think he’s a devil. Determined to protect him, his mother fakes his death, and they flee. Thus begins Johnny’s yearslong struggle to find a place he belongs. From a turpentine camp of former slaves to a freak show run by a dwarf who calls herself Tiny Tot and on to the Florida capitol building, Johnny finds himself working alongside other outcasts, struggling to answer the question of his existence. Is he a horror, a wonder or an angel? Should he hide himself to live his life? Mustian is also the founder of the Word of South Festival, and this is his third novel.
The Story She Left Behind by Patti Callahan Henry (March 18)
In 1927, eight-year-old Clara Harrington’s magical childhood shatters when her mother, renowned author Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, disappears off the coast of South Carolina. Bronwyn stunned the world with a book written in an invented language that became a national sensation when she was just 12 years old. Her departure leaves behind not only a devoted husband and heartbroken daughter, but also the hope of ever translating the sequel to her landmark work. As the headlines focus on the missing author, Clara yearns for something far deeper and more insatiable: her beautiful mother. By 1952, Clara is an illustrator raising her own daughter, Wynnie. When a stranger named Charlie Jameson contacts her from London claiming to have discovered a handwritten dictionary of her mother’s lost language, Clara is skeptical. Compelled by the tragedy of her mother’s vanishing, she crosses the Atlantic with Wynnie only to arrive during one of London’s most deadly natural disasters—the Great Smog. Read our interview with Patti Callahan Henry here.
Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine by Callie Collins (March 18)
Austin, Texas, is a town in the throes of social upheaval, and the Rush Creek Saloon, five miles on its outskirts, is a bar without a crowd. Until a strange new house band transforms it from moribund honky-tonk to thriving blues bar. But are the throngs of people and the rowdy music worth the chaos that comes with them? From queer Texan writer and editor Callie Collins, Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine is told through three perspectives, each of whom is in some way responsible for the rebirth of Rush Creek and for the violence that follows in the afterbirth. Doug Moser, a country-and-blues guitarist from San Antonio, is seizing his long-awaited chance at fame but cannot turn away from the booze and drugs that come with the life. Rush Creek owner Deanna Teague has a rocky marriage and sense of herself, but she sees a crack of light if she can just hold it all together. And Steven Francis is a boy who grapples with his sexuality, his God and his place in a town where he badly wants to belong.
Behind the Waterline by Kionna Walker LeMalle (March 25)
When Hurricane Katrina approaches New Orleans, teenaged Eric and his grandmother and many of their neighbors decide to ride out the storm. Kionna Walker LeMalle’s masterful debut novel brings her readers, like the rising water, onto Eric’s street in the Third Ward, where stranded dogs bark for a time, where neighbors are floating on doors and where Eric and his grandmother must take refuge in his second-floor bedroom. After days of heat, dwindling supplies and relentless rising water, neighbors begin to disappear and Eric’s grandmother, already known as an eccentric, begins to falter. It is then that Eric—in a dream, a hallucination or something else—discovers a room beyond his closet wall, a place he has never seen. What he discovers inside will send him on a path to discover secrets to survival, bitter progress, and, ultimately, the history of his own people—those he sorely misses and those he never even knew.
Gothictown by Emily Carpenter (March 25)
Welcome to gentle Juliana, where you can have it all … if you pay the price.
The email that lands in Billie Hope’s inbox seems like a gift from the universe. For $100, she can purchase a spacious Victorian home in Juliana, Georgia, a small town eager to boost its economy in the wake of the pandemic. She can leave behind her cramped New York City rental and the painful memories of shuttering her once thriving restaurant and start over with her husband and her daughter. Plus, she’ll get a business grant to open a new restaurant in a charming riverside community laden with opportunity. It seems like a dream come true, but there’s something about “Gentle Juliana”—something off-kilter and menacing beneath that famous Southern hospitality. And no matter how much Billie longed for her family to come here, she’s starting to wonder how, and if, they’ll ever leave. Read our interview with Emily Carpenter here.
Out in April
Home of the Happy by Jordan Lahaye Fontenot (April 1)
On January 16, 1983, Aubrey LaHaye’s body was found floating in the Bayou Nezpique. His kidnapping 10 days before sparked “the biggest manhunt in the history of Evangeline Parish.” But his descendants would hear the story as lore, in whispers of the dreadful day the FBI landed a helicopter in the family’s front lawn and set out on horseback to search the South Louisiana prairie for the 70-year-old banker. Decades later, Aubrey’s great-granddaughter Jordan LaHaye Fontenot asked her father, the parish urologist, to tell the full story. He revealed that to this day, every few months, one of his patients will bring up his grandfather’s murder, and the man accused of killing him, John Brady Balfa, who remains at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola serving a life sentence. They’ll say, in so many words: “Dr. Marcel, I really don’t think that Balfa boy killed your granddaddy.”
The River Knows Your Name by Kelly Mustian (April 1)
For nearly 30 years, Nell has kept a childhood promise to never reveal what she and Evie found tucked inside a copy of Jane Eyre in their mother’s bookcase―a record of Evie’s birth naming a stranger as her mother. But lately, Nell has been haunted by hazy memories of their early life in Mississippi, years their reclusive mother, Hazel, has kept shrouded in secrecy. Evie recalls nothing before their house on Clay Mountain in North Carolina, but Nell remembers abrupt moves, odd accommodations and the rainy night a man in a dark coat and a hat pulled low climbed their porch steps with a very little girl―Evie―then left without her. In dual storylines, Nell, f42 in 1971, reaches into the past to uncover dangerous, long-buried secrets, and Becca, a young mother in the early 1930s, presses ahead, each moving toward 1934, the catastrophic year that would forever link them.
Bitter Texas Honey by Ashley Whitaker (April 15)
“The Royal Tenenbaums” meets “Fleabag” in this hilarious debut about an over-the-top evangelical Texan family—and the daughter at its center racing to finish her very important novel before her ex-boyfriend finishes his. It’s 2011, and 23-year-old Joan West is not like the rest of her liberal peers in Austin, nor is she quite like her Tea Party Republican, God-loving family. Sure, she listens to conservative talk radio on her way to and from her internship at the Capitol. But she was once an America-hating leftist who kissed girls at parties, refused to shave and had plenty of emotionless sex with jazz school friends—that is until a drug-induced mania forced her to return to her senses. But above all, Joan is a writer, an artist, or at least she desperately wants to be. Always in search of inspiration for her novel, she catalogs every detail of her relationships with men—including with her former muse slash current arch nemesis Roberto—and mines her very dysfunctional family for material. But when her beloved, credit card debt–racked cousin Wyatt finds himself in crisis, Joan’s worldview is cracked open and everything comes crashing down.
Hellions: Stories by Julia Elliott (April 15)
In a plague-stricken medieval convent, a nun works on a forbidden mystic manuscript. In rural South Carolina, an alligator named Dragon becomes a beloved pet for a precocious, tough-talking 12-year-old. During a long, muggy July, an adolescent girl finds unexpected power as her family obsesses over the horror film “The Exorcist.” On the outskirts of a Southern college town, a young woman resists the tyranny of a shape-shifting older professor as she develops her own sorceress skills. And at a feminist art colony in the North Carolina mountains, a group of mothers contends with the supernatural talents their children have picked up from a pair of mysterious orphans who live in the woods. Julia Elliott’s eclectic story collection blends folklore, fairy tales, Southern Gothic and horror.
