20 selections from authors across the South to chip away at your 2026 reading goal.
OUT NOW
All the Little Houses by May Cobb
It’s the mid-1980s in the tiny town of Longview, Texas. Nellie Anderson, the beautiful daughter of the Anderson family dynasty, has burst onto the scene. She always gets what she wants. What she can’t get for herself … well, that’s what her mother is for. Because Charleigh Andersen, blond, beautiful and ruthlessly cunning, remembers all too well having to claw her way to the top. When she was coming of age on the poor side of East Texas, she was a loser, an outcast, humiliated and shunned by the in-crowd, whose approval she’d so desperately thirsted for. When a prairie-kissed family moves to town, all trad wife, woodworking dad, wholesome daughter vibes, Charleigh’s entire self-made social empire threatens to crumble. Who will be left standing when the dust settles?
Anatomy of An Alibi by Ashley Elston
Everyone at Chantilly’s Bar noticed out-of-towner Camille Bayliss. Red lips, designer heels, sipping a Negroni. But that woman wasn’t Camille Bayliss. It was Aubrey Price. Aubrey has been haunted by the terrible night that changed her life a decade ago, and she’s convinced Benjamin Bayliss knows something about it. Camille Bayliss appears to have the picture-perfect life; she’s married to hotshot lawyer Ben and is the daughter of a wealthy Louisiana family. Only nothing is as it seems: Camille believes Ben has been hiding dirty secrets for years, but she can’t find proof because he tracks her every move. Aubrey and Camille hatch a plan. It sounds simple: For 12 hours, Aubrey will take Camille’s place. Camille will spy on Ben, and the two women will get the answers they desperately seek. Except the next morning, Ben is found murdered. Both women need an airtight alibi, but only one of them has it. And one false step is all it takes for everything to come undone.
Conversations with Ellen Gilchrist Edited by Tracy Carr
Known for her short stories populated by a recurring cast of headstrong, honest and sometimes outrageous Southern women characters, Ellen Gilchrist’s (1935–2024) four decades of writing and 26 works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry solidly place her among the South’s most enduring authors. After winning a National Book Award in 1984 for the short story collection Victory Over Japan, she was a weekly commentator on NPR’s then-new Morning Edition. While she wrote six critically acclaimed novels, short stories were where she was truly at home, especially those featuring Rhoda Manning, her most famous and most autobiographical character. The 18 interviews featured in this collection reveal Gilchrist to be just as honest, and sometimes outrageous, as her characters. Whether she is discussing her work or her life, Gilchrist’s excitement and zest for life comes through in every word. Read a review of this book here.
Dear Second Husband by Susan Finch
Set in the rapidly changing city of Nashville, Tennessee, the characters in Dear Second Husband struggle to make their marriages, friendships and families thrive despite the pressures of modern life. An unapologetic widower, a self-destructive musician, a teacher grieving a miscarriage and a mother trying to be everything for everyone rely on resilience and persistence to find joy and belonging in the fragile connections between one another. “Dear Second Husband explores the complexities of womanhood and particularly motherhood, showcasing love beside ambivalence, devotion beside the untamable desire for freedom,” says Gwen E. Kirby, author of Shit Cassandra Saw. “These stories are taut domestic dramas that bring into beautiful, painful clarity the fears and ambitions of women who long to be as loud on the outside as they are on the inside.”
The Irish Goodbye by Beth Ann Fennelly
What can we learn from an ordinary life observed with extraordinary skill? In The Irish Goodbye, Beth Ann Fennelly writes of the small moments that shape a life, whether moving or perplexing or troubling or gladdening, in the process dignifying the diminutive through the act of attention. Fennelly explores her roles as a friend, wife, mother and daughter, documenting a brush with an old flame or the devastating death of her sister in crystalline, precise sentences. The longer essays concern Fennelly’s relationships, and interspersed between these longer memoirs are sections of flash nonfiction. With dazzling verve and wit, they capture the interstitial interactions―encounters with strangers, quirky observations, unexpected flights of fancy―that make up a richly lived life. Fennelly invites readers to share her affirming worldview―one in which even our smallest interactions are rife with possibility.
Kin by Tayari Jones
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at 18 for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.
Marriage and Other Monuments by Virginia Pye
In the summer of 2020, social justice protests and the removal of Confederate monuments rock the city of Richmond, Virginia, as the marriages of two estranged sisters implode. When Cynthia’s husband, Bobby, can no longer hide his dire financial situation, their union finally ruptures. Melissa, her sister, has dedicated herself so fully to racial justice activism that she becomes alienated from her own Black husband. As the summer heats up and their marriages veer in opposite directions, the sisters have no choice but to turn to one another. Meanwhile, their husbands conspire in a racial reckoning that their ancestors—one old Virginia White, the other old Virginia Black—would never have dreamed of. When secrets within marriage erode trust, all couples must decide what’s more important: being true to who they are as individuals or holding on to an illusion of the past. Read a review of this book here.
One Beautiful Year by Sandra K. Griffith
Some memories protect you. Others imprison you. When August Caine receives a phone call from a Savannah attorney, she is blindsided by the news—her Aunt Helen has passed away. But how can that be, when August’s mother insisted Helen died in a car accident 15 years ago? Determined to uncover the truth, August returns to the deep South, where the ghosts of her past, both real and imagined, await her. Plagued by a memory splintered by her father’s unsolved murder when she was a child and further tangled by psychiatric treatments for the debilitating depression she struggles with, August realizes her survival depends on unraveling the mystery surrounding her father’s death. This means returning to the one safe place she remembers from the childhood she has mostly locked away inside her mind: Aunt Helen’s home and the ghost tours they created together.
Where the Wildflowers Grow by Terah Shelton Harris
Leigh is the last of the Wildes. She knows this because she watched them all die. Grief never truly fades and even as the tragedy haunts her, Leigh carries on, because survival is in her blood. So, when the transport bus taking her to prison careens off the road, killing everyone onboard except her, she does what’s in her nature. She survives. While searching for a place to hide, Leigh stumbles upon an unexpected sanctuary: a flower farm in rural Alabama tucked away from the world. What Leigh doesn’t expect is the found family there who have built something from the wreckage of their own lives. Especially Jackson, the farm’s owner, who sees through Leigh’s defenses, offers her small moments of tenderness and encourages her to face her own tragedies. Slowly, Leigh finds peace with the hard pace and soft nature of the farm, taking comfort in the life blooming around her. But the past isn’t so easily buried. And when those secrets catch up to her, threatening everything she’s come to love, Leigh will have to truly face what she can survive.
Women of a Promiscuous Nature by Donna Everhart
The day Ruth Foster’s life changes begins the same way as many others—with a walk through her North Carolina hometown toward the diner where she works. But on this day, Ruth is stopped by the local sheriff, who insists that she accompany him to a health clinic. Women like Ruth—young, unmarried, living alone—must undergo testing in order to preserve decency and prevent the spread of sexual disease. Though Ruth has never shared more than a chaste kiss with a man, by day’s end she is one of dozens of women held at the State Industrial Farm Colony for Women. Superintendent Dorothy Baker, convinced that she’s transforming degenerate souls into upstanding members of society, oversees the women’s medical treatment and “training” until they’re deemed ready for parole. Sooner or later, everyone at the Colony learns to abide by Mrs. Baker’s rule book or face the consequences. But some refuse to be cowed. Against Mrs. Baker’s dogged efforts, Ruth and other inmates find ways to fight back, resolved to regain their freedom at any cost.
OUT IN MARCH
A Spell for Saints and Sinners by Emily Carpenter
In front of an elegantly shabby townhouse on a Savannah side street sits a hand-painted sign: Miss Edie, Psychic. Ingrid White inherited the house and business from her beloved grandmother, a local celebrity in town. But unless Ingrid can find a way to pay for crushing property taxes and mounting repairs, she’s going to lose them both. Hope and clients are dwindling, until Sailor Loeffler’s bachelorette party changes everything. Sailor is local royalty—part of the vast “Savannah Sauce” empire, beautiful and wealthy beyond imagining, and Ingrid’s reading is so accurate that she becomes her confidante. To keep that access and all the privileges it brings, Ingrid relies more and more on hexes and dark spells—using the baneful magic Edie always warned her against. As Ingrid works even riskier spells, she is drawn further into the Loefflers’ inner circle, and her obstacles melt away. Ingrid can feel the lines blurring even as her powers seem to grow, until she must confront the truth about just how far some people will go to get the life they’ve always wanted. Out March 31
Ava by Victoria Dillon
Ten years after Roe v. Wade is overturned, 22-year-old biologist Larkin finds herself unexpectedly pregnant in a country where choice is no longer an option. Initially uncertain, she embraces motherhood—until a devastating diagnosis changes everything. Trapped by Tennessee’s strict abortion laws, she is forced to carry her baby to term, only to endure the heartbreak of losing her hours after birth. Years later, Larkin joins a radical scientific movement that could change everything: a groundbreaking technology that replaces gestation with incubation, allowing women true control over their reproduction. When she uses it to bring her second daughter, Ava, into the world, she believes she has finally reclaimed her autonomy. But as Ava grows and begins to question the very choice that created her, Larkin is challenged in ways she never imagined. Out March 3
Kissing the Sky by Lisa Patton
It’s the summer of ’69. While her peers revel in free love and rock and roll, Suzannah is home from college, sequestered inside her conservative Southern home. Her domineering father has condemned rock music and driven away her best friend. She’s counting the days until fall. But everything changes when her free-spirited best friend, Livy, resurfaces, urging Suzannah, a talented singer, to join her for three days of peace and music in upstate New York. Fed up with her father’s rules and fearful for her brother’s fate in Vietnam, Suzannah agrees to the road trip, sneaking off without her parents’ knowledge. Miles outside her comfort zone, the electrifying bedlam of Woodstock jolts her into a journey of self-transformation. But it’s not all incense and peppermints. Suzannah’s falling hard for Leon, a boy she meets at the festival, and the seductive bud of first love conceals a thorn of heartache. Lies uncover betrayal, and Livy’s wild behavior leads to a startling revelation. Out March 1
The Marriage Bed by Tommy Hays
A poetry professor at a small college in Asheville, North Carolina, Asa Flowers comes home one stormy evening to find his wife Betsy inexplicably distraught. As the evening goes on, the couple end up in a heated argument that sends Asa to sleep out in their garage apartment for the first time in 25 years of marriage. The next morning, he wakes to blue sky and an altered world. Unfolding over a few tense weeks and told from multiple points of view, this novel explores how a tragedy can assume as many shapes as the people it touches. Asa finds himself reckoning with torn feelings about his marriage and confusion about how to proceed in his complicated relationships with his adult children. As he gradually absorbs revelations—so much he didn’t know or understand during his long marriage—he finds himself drawn uneasily toward a new world, one in which he must shed much of his old identity if he is to survive and, more important, rededicate himself to being a father. Out March 24
Sing Down the Moon by Robert Gwaltney
Sixteen-year-old Leontyne Skye yearns to escape Good Hope, the remote Georgia coastal barrier island where she resides. Leontyne’s heritage is bleak. Tasked with tending Damascus, an ancient fig tree beguiling haints across the river with its wind chime song, Leontyne’s mother, Eulalee, disintegrates into tufts of hair, teeth and memory. This affliction befalls all Skye women, a fatal consequence of an addictive drug made from the figs of Damascus imbued with the essence of haints. Leontyne also tumbles apart, her memories and hand lost in a life-altering accident. Through unreliable recollections of her trusted friends, the Longwood twins, Leontyne stitches a dubious understanding of who she was before she fell. In the aftermath of Eulalee’s death, Leontyne is pressured by the Longwoods to render the drug, continuing the legacy upon which Good Hope depends. Each moment Leontyne refuses Damascus, haints accumulate in menacing hordes. As Leontyne’s memories return, everything she believes to be true is called into question. Out March 3
South of Somewhere by T.I. Lowe
When Juniper Wilder’s grief spiraled into addiction, leading first to an arrest for drunk driving, then jail and court-ordered rehab, she lost the most important thing in her life: her baby girl. Now, sober and on probation, Junie is determined to prove she can be the mother Fern deserves. But she’s burned a lot of bridges, ones that can’t be easily rebuilt. Exiled to her late grandmother’s South Carolina beach house, Junie starts over, ready to pay off her debts and prove to her brother that he can safely return custody of Fern. She works hard and finds surprising grace in an eclectic recovery community. There’s an unexpected friendship, too—and maybe more—with her neighbor, Henry, a quirky college professor who helps her believe in second chances. Still, it’s hard for Junie to imagine ever forgiving herself, let alone receiving forgiveness from those she’s hurt. Particularly when her past rears its ugly head and threatens to undo every bit of progress she’s made. Out March 10
Turn Off The Light by Jacquie Walters
On the isolated Eastern Shore of Virginia, Edith is a healer, a woman of knowledge—and a woman watched. Shadows move where they shouldn’t. Whispers creep through the dark. Terrified she has opened her home to the devil, Edith makes a desperate choice. Claire doesn’t believe in ghosts—until she returns home to care for her dying father and finds her childhood house … listening. As one sleepless night bleeds into the next, she becomes convinced something is stirring beneath the floorboards. Something that has waited a long time to rise. Is the house haunted? What compels this lurking darkness? As the danger mounts, Edith and Claire will discover they’ll need each other to survive. But they are separated by 400 years. And time is running out for them both. Out March 3
Yellow by Amy Pence
It’s 1973: summer of the Watergate hearings and Skylab’s launch into space when 12-year-old Z discovers an unclassified slime mold growing in her Louisiana backyard. Something compels her deep coherence with this magical creature—until an incident with a serial killer at the lake disrupts their connection. Both mystifying and metaphorical, Yellow becomes a guiding force for her brother Clem, a New Orleans seeker. As years pass, Z tries to recover what life has taught her to forget. “Who could guess that the story of a young girl’s fascination with slime mold would open into the riveting portrayal of a particular family’s history, a female artist’s archetypal journey, the textures and tensions of America, Hurricane Katrina, a predator’s mind, the Space Race/alien encounters, our relationship with the natural world, and the nature of consciousness?” asks Claire Bateman, author of The Pillow Museum. Out March 24
OUT IN APRIL
The Mountains We Call Home: The Book Woman’s Legacy by Kim Michele Richardson
In this standalone and companion novel to the The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek series, our heroine for the ages, legendary book woman, Cussy Lovett, returns home. A powerful testament of strength, survival and the magic of the printed word, The Mountains We Call Home is wrapped into a vivid portrait of Kentucky life: examining incarceration and criminalization, exploring the effects on the poor and powerless, and tracing the societal consequences of fractured family bonds, along with nostalgic glimpses of a bustling, multifaceted Louisville, and heartwarming portraits of reading efforts in every facet of life. Out April 21
Wolvers by Taylor Brown
Broke, dispossessed and angry at the government after losing his family’s New Mexico ranch, Trace Temple is looking for revenge. He’s living out of his truck when a shadowy militia movement hires him to take down the legendary she-wolf of the Dark Canyon pack, One-Eleven. But One-Eleven is no ordinary wolf. Cunning, fiercely protective of her young and seasoned in the ways of men, she leads her pack deep into the forbidding desert peaks and canyons, always one step ahead of pursuit. After a harrowing brush with death in the backcountry, Trace has a change of heart―only to be replaced by a professional hunter and assassin named Murdoch, who ruthlessly pursues his animal quarry while stalking Trace himself. To survive, Trace must join forces with a pair of unlikely allies. Together, they must fight to protect not only themselves and the Dark Canyon pack, but ultimately, the Gila Wilderness itself―the world’s first designated wilderness area. Out April 7
