Southern suburban housewife Lia and her husband Evan have long dreamed of becoming parents—but when a pregnancy test shows positive, Lia questions whether she wants the child and keeps her pregnancy a secret.

As she’s holding new life inside, she intentionally surrounds herself with death by blackmailing her way into a job at a forensic anthropology center endearingly called The Body Farm. At The Farm, monsters emerge from within Lia—the desire to kill—and she begins daydreaming about murder. Because fantasizing never hurt anyone. Or so she thinks.

Then a body donation to The Farm turns out to be someone she’s imagined killing, and reality and fantasy begin to blur. As people around her begin to die, Lia loses trust in her loved ones and herself … and ultimately must put her monsters to bed.

Eldest sister Caroline has never been happier. The family business is thriving, her kids are great, and her sister Emerson’s hunky costar has absolutely swept her off her feet. But when her not-quite-ex-husband decides it’s high time he begged Caroline for a second chance, she is thrown into the midst of a love triangle she never saw coming. Caroline is the family fixer and, when her sisters Sloane and Emerson and daughter Vivi need her help with their troubles, she has to decide whether to swoop in and save them—or if it’s finally time to focus on what she wants.

Matriarch Ansley and her new husband, Jack, have finally hit their stride. But when a scandal rips through Peachtree Bluff—and Jack just might be at the center of it—Ansley is left questioning whether the man she has loved since she was 16 years old, the man she fought so hard to be with, is actually who she thought he was at all.

The air is crisper, the water is calmer, but, when it comes to the Murphy family, nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems. Through it all, these Southern women must rely on their powerful family bonds and the quirky characters and small-town charm of the place that, no matter what, always calls them home.

Fifteen years ago, Audrey Figg’s little brother, Benny, vanished on a family vacation to Devil’s Den state park, a day that split her life in two. Now, Audrey is a park ranger in the very same woods with expertise in wilderness search and rescue. Audrey has found a rhythm to her days: training new rangers, tending to injured hikers, protecting the backcountry and, still, searching.

When a little girl, Ivy, suddenly goes missing on the trails, Audrey can’t help but notice the similarities to her own brother’s case. As Audrey widens the scope of her search, she begins to believe Ivy wasn’t merely lost; it looks like she was taken by something—and maybe Benny was too. Yet the closer Audrey comes to answers, the more old memories push to the surface. Audrey is haunted not only by her brother’s loss, but a terrible secret from that day. A secret she has never shared with anyone.

Read our interview with Carrie Lee South here.

Deep within southside Virginia lies the Snakefoot—a wild swampland that holds secrets, hides truths and harbors the dead in murky waters that refuse to shine yet somehow glow.

One morning, a pickup truck is found jammed into the mud, the driver’s door open amidst scattered bullets and bloodstains on the seat. The driver, Rainbo Boon, is nowhere to be found, but his tracks lead Deputy Sheriff Will Seems and his partner, Tania Jameson, into the swamp.

​​​During their investigation, Buck Tomlin, the grandson of the missing Rainbo, proves cooperative, at least at first. But when the boy’s whereabouts from the night of the accident don’t check out, Will and Tania must confront the troubling reality that the Snakefoot might hold more than just a runaway victim.

As Will and Tania search for answers, so does Buck, and the sum of their investigations illuminates the hard fact that there is a price for progress, and a cost to living by a code.  Sometimes all a person has is his word, and that word is his bond.

In Richard Ford’s view, Jim Shepard’s “talent is so various and canny he can write about seemingly anything and make it thrilling to us.” With civil engineers and destitute veterans, we encounter the devastating 1935 Labor Day hurricane in Florida. We read the 1864 letters between Lucy in Boon, North Carolina (“Three privates are currently sleeping soundly on our porch in their muddy blankets”) and her great love, William, on the march in Tennessee (“I can’t write much for it seems we are looking for a fight every minute”). The title story introduces us to the stubborn Constance, who had “no gift for flirtation” with men, preferring Minna, her best friend and “queen of bad influences,” as their vexed devotion unfolds in part on the liner Lusitania.

With irony, compassion and withering humor, these stories evoke the terrible ease with which cataclysm, human-engineered or otherwise, can sweep away all we find most precious and expose those limitations we’ve refused to address. At the same time, Shepard celebrates what is best in us: the love and friendships we sustain, and the passions and grace we grant one another.

In December 2000, Derwin Brown, the newly elected sheriff of DeKalb County, Georgia, was ambushed and murdered in his own driveway just days before taking office. He had run on reform—promising to clean up corruption and restore integrity to the sheriff’s department—defeating the powerful incumbent in a bitter runoff.

The case fell to J.Tom Morgan, then the county’s elected District Attorney. Working alongside local, state, and federal law enforcement, Morgan pursued the case through months of dead ends, mounting pressure and intense public scrutiny. It became a national media sensation, combining political intrigue with revelations of government corruption, murder-for-hire plots and a never-before-tried legal strategy in the Georgia criminal justice system. Then the case became personal: Morgan learned that his own name was next on the killer’s hit list.

In A Rainy Night in Georgia, Morgan gives readers something almost no one else can—a first-person account of power, danger and integrity from inside the justice system. What began as a baffling, unsolved murder evolved into one of the most extraordinary political assassination cases in modern American history after a shocking discovery.

Charley Bryde is miserable in a house filled with magic. The only woman in a long line of famous psychics to not inherit the family gift, she spends her days inside Crimson House, the coveted family mansion in Memphis, Tennessee, living in the shadows of her talented older sister, Miranda. But when a shocking tragedy scatters the Brydes across the globe, Charley is forced to grow up on her own, and fast. As the money runs dry and Charley’s ownership of Crimson House is put at risk, she’s left with no other option; turn the manor into a haunted attraction and start representing the family brand with lies, cons and expertly read tarot cards. 

When a skeptic starts targeting Charley for the fraud that she is, she’ll stop at nothing to save the family legacy. But the skeptics’ arrival cracks something open in Charley that the Brydes wanted to remain buried. Deep. And when Miranda shows up unannounced after eight years away, the two will come to realize that Crimson House, and their own family, hold secrets even the greatest psychics couldn’t foresee. Secrets that will threaten to destroy them.

Two women. Two centuries. One chance to rewrite history before they are both erased. Lilith Legare’s life is unraveling. Since her mother’s death, strange things have been happening—plants turn toward her touch, animals linger in her path, and the birthmark on her arm has started tingling. Worse still is her recurring nightmare of being burned alive at the stake. 

Her search for answers brings her from Savannah to England, to the decaying Brackenmere Manor where the past blurs with the present. There, Lilith discovers a legacy she never asked for and along with it, the threat of peril. History must be rewritten, or she too will die. In 1645 Suffolk, Sybil Brantham stands accused as a witch. An educated, wealthy widow, she is branded a threat by men who fear her independence. As arrests begin and suspicion abounds, Sybil must protect her younger sister, even as betrayal takes root within her household. 

Across centuries, Lilith and Sybil are bound by blood and by danger. To save themselves, and each other, they must confront the silence that has stolen women’s power for generations—and dare to claim their voices before it’s too late.

Milly can’t divine the future anymore, and maybe that’s a good thing. Lately, her life has been bleak enough, she doesn’t need the now-silent tea leaves to tell her. Meanwhile, her estranged younger sister thrives miles away in a shiny new life with a shiny new marriage. Milly doesn’t blame Francis for wanting nothing to do with her. Not after what happened in that Tennessee meadow a decade before.

But when Francis shows up on Milly’s doorstep with a black eye and a plea for help, Milly can’t say no. Especially when the tea leaves are finally crystal clear: If the sisters don’t kill Francis’s husband, he’ll kill her.

And if they’re going to plot a murder, the sisters have no choice but to return to the one place they’d left behind. A place where another body—and a multitude of secrets—were buried. Because this isn’t the first time the sisters have needed to dispose of a bad man. In fact, they might be pretty good at it.

The Greers built their fortune on alligator bones.

Dartrine Beaumont believes her mother’s sudden death has left her alone in the world—until she learns of long-lost wealthy relatives living in Florida. Confused but delighted by the possibility of extended family, Dart travels to her grandmother’s stately Gilded Age mansion on Amelia Island for answers, just in time to stake a claim on an unusual inheritance: an alligator farming empire.

Her arrival at Greer House isn’t everything she hoped. Without warning, Dart finds herself in fierce competition with her grandmother’s arrogant heir-apparent, and tensions rise as threatening acts of vandalism escalate on one of the farms. More unsettling is her hostile grandmother’s fanatical belief that the danger stems from a curse; according to legend, a larger-than-life alligator hunted down by a bloodthirsty ancestor still haunts the family. Yet Dart can’t deny that the farm’s placid alligators hiss only at Greers or that a shadowy figure creeps through the mansion’s halls, plaguing her with suspicions that the mythical alligator and monstrous, long-dead matriarch may have unfinished business.

As Dart uncovers the truth about her violent birthright, she must decide whether to accept her place in her family’s grim legacy or forge a new path by slaying a different beast entirely.

George Washington Jonson is determined to forge a new life. After growing up in one of Atlanta’s poorest housing projects, he enlists in the U.S. Army and finds some relief serving abroad. When events lead him back home, he joins the police force. It’s 1992, and Jonson is patrolling the streets he grew up on alongside his new partner, a shady legacy cop and self-described “redneck” who takes Jonson under his wing.

After a decade on the job, Jonson has fashioned a new life in an affluent suburb with his white wife and stepson, though he’s still policing his old neighborhood, and now tasked with training hot-headed rookie recruits. One night on patrol a split-second confrontation with a white teenager takes a violent turn. That single gunshot sets into motion a series of escalating lies.

When the white-washed veneer of Jonson’s life begins to crack, the story splits, presenting two contrasting versions of the American experience as he’s forced to confront the history that shaped him and the compromises required of a good man in a broken system.

In 1999, in the rural Alabama town of Ozark, the bodies of two white teenage girls, J.B. Beasley and Tracie Hawlett, were found shot in the trunk of Beasley’s car. The girl were out past curfew and celebrating Beasley’s birthday―but from there the story grew tangled, then went dark.

As months, then years, passed without answers, an eccentric cast of townspeople took it upon themselves to chase down leads. In this hardscrabble, farming region at the Southern tip of the Bible Belt―a place cut off from freeways and wary of outsiders―everyone knew you couldn’t trust the cops. Their investigation was shoddy at best; at worst, it looked a lot like a coverup.

Twenty years later, the chief of police called his childhood friend, a devout Black man and long-haul trucker named Coley McCraney, into the station. To the shock of the community, and most of all McCraney, he was arrested for the long-ago murder of two girls he didn’t seem to recognize. DNA evidence tied McCraney to the crime scene. But in a region rife with corruption, and haunted by a legacy of racist violence, was there any chance of finding the truth?

Amos and Tom fall in love while working in the tobacco fields during the hot summers of the early 1900s, yet Tom cannot shake his strict religious upbringing nor the responsibilities of his family’s farm. His longtime friend Maeve also pines for a man she can’t have, lest she endanger his already tenuous life in a town and world shaped by racial lines. How do you live a life that feels untrue and at what point do you risk everything?

The Tulip Poplars is a gorgeous and moving novel spanning most of the 20th century, centering on four people trying to find happiness in a world that demands conventional choices. House tells a deeply intimate story of faith and doubt, race and class, sexual desire and the longing to be good when you’ve been taught that you are evil for loving who you love. Based on the story of an ancestor, House’s new novel takes us from New York City to Southern cities to Appalachia and will leave you with a bigger heart.

When a volcano suddenly emerges in the middle of his family’s Alabama cattle pasture, young Charlie Melvin is confronted with a promise his grandfather once made―that something extraordinary would rise from the land.

As Charlie comes of age, he wrestles with the meaning of the volcano and the legacy of his family. His story unfolds through evocative vignettes that explore love, loss, responsibility and faith.

Graceful, tender and emotionally resonant, Bradley Sides’ The Volcano Keeper is a moving portrait of a young man navigating grief while discovering the quiet miracles woven into the natural world.

Serenity Tomczyk isn’ t dying— she just has anxiety, a WebMD habit and a cat named Margaret Thatcher. After breaking off her engagement and losing both parents, she retreats into a predictable life of retail shifts, group therapy and the safety of solitude. Then, a box of passionate letters appears in a dumpster behind her aunt’ s home decor shop, and Serenity becomes captivated by the mysterious man who wrote them. Soon, she’ s chasing a fantasy 900 miles from Michigan to Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, in search of the stranger she knows only as “Birdy.”

Thrown from her carefully padded comfort zone, Serenity discovers unexpected friendships, uncomfortable truths and the possibility of love. But when her imagined happy ending begins to unravel, she must decide if holding on— or letting go— is the bravest thing she can do. With with heart and irrepressible warmth, Love and Other Incurable Ailments is a story about connection, courage and becoming yourself— just when you thought it was too late.

Three estranged sisters—Helen, Anna and Penn Lockshire—are bound by the shimmering but fragile legacy of their family’s freshwater pearl farm in rural Tennessee. When the business that once made them famous faces collapse, the sisters are pulled back into each other’s lives and forced to reckon with old betrayals, unspoken resentments and the complicated truth of their inheritance. Soon, what began as a fight for survival becomes a reckoning with the myths that shaped them and the secrets buried in the family’s past.

From the discovery of a rare pearl in 1981 to the struggles of a failing farm in 2008, the Lockshire sisters must navigate love, loss, ambition and forgiveness to decide whether their heritage is a blessing to preserve—or a burden to escape.

Rich with emotional depth and anchored by the pearl’s enduring symbolism—a thing of beauty born from irritation—this sweeping story of family, identity and resilience will captivate readers of Celeste Ng and Claire Lombardo.

This is not a traditional cookbook, though readers will find recipes inside it. It is not a traditional memoir either, though its pages are full of memory, confession, family history, grief, desire and hard-earned tenderness. Instead, JI Daniels has created a hybrid work that uses food as both structure and strategy, turning each recipe into a standalone essay and each meal into a way of approaching what cannot be spoken directly.

At the heart of the book is a traumatic childhood event involving the author’s biological father, an event Daniels does not remember but cannot escape. Around that absence, he builds a kitchen, a mythology and a language of survival. Family members become monsters and mythic beings. Friends and lovers become gods. Food becomes an offering, a shield, a seduction, a confession, a ritual and sometimes a form of self-punishment.

The book moves through desserts, entrees, sides, starters, cocktails and kitchen rituals, but the real ingredients are memory, longing, sex, cultural inheritance, Southern identity, shame, hunger, humor and love. Fried chicken, croquembouche, funeral potatoes, black-eyed peas, shrubs, deviled eggs and sweet tea all become more than food. They become evidence. They become invitations. They become the things we put on the table because saying the truth plainly might destroy us.