Southern Fiction Family

In 1928, Minnie's mother, Nora, arrives at her nursing college after abandoning her a few years ago as a child. What does Nora want? An unexpected visit to Grandpa and Marie at the Big House offers Minnie shelter and refuge, but no longer the carefree days of her youthful experiences there. She discovers secrets. Shrewd and hidden manipulations of power ensure the survival of the Big House in this small Southern town, where a smile can mask suppressed rage and hostility.

When Meg shows up at her mother's door, she has no idea how to break the news to her. She's come home from France, pregnant. At just nineteen years old, this wasn't where she saw her life going. Now, trying to hide her growing belly and figure out her next decision, she moves in with her mother, sister and aunt on Seabreeze Island. But, how long can she keep her pregnancy a secret, and what happens if another surprising person shows up at the front door of Julie's house?

In the Deep South, where love and hatred run deep and close, dissension often summers just beneath the surface. When a family gathers for a funeral as its old homestead above the waters of Mobile Bay, it must carry out the last wish of the aunt and sister whom it has come to mourn. It is a wish that will unearth a terrible secret, one that will either tear her siblings and their offspring apart or allow them to accept buried memories, wounds, and love.

From New York Times bestselling author Patti Callahan Henry, The Idea of Love asks, "Can two people come together for all the wrong reasons and still make it right?" Ella's life has been completely upended. She's young, beautiful, and deeply in love--until her husband dies in a tragic sailing...

Minnie leaves boarding school to spend the summer at The Big House, her cherished Grandpa's home. She enjoys adventure, but she also learns of the dangers posed by the land and a river that can seduce the unwary. The arrival of Minnie's great-grandmother provides her with a fearless female role model as well as tales of the elderly woman's antebellum past and how she survived the Civil War.

A charming, heartfelt novel about the bonds of family, whether found or foretold, from the author of The Sweet Taste of Muscadines. In the small Southern town of Wesleyan, Georgia, where the air smells of red clay and sea salt, Margaret Elliot has lived a seemingly charmed life—until the...

After a series of devastating losses, Chicago journalist Hannah Williamson has landed in Senatobia, Mississippi, to care for her bedridden grandmother and endure grunt work at a small newspaper. But in cleaning out its archives, Hannah discovers a compelling distraction from her life: a series of rejected articles from the 1930s that illuminate a long-hidden mystery.

Carl Weber takes readers back to church in his latest drama-filled novel, the much-anticipated sequel to the New York Times bestseller, The Choir Director. It's been three years since Aaron Mackie succeeded in helping his friend and mentor, Bishop T.K. Wilson, dig his ministry out of financial...

After 60 years of marriage and five daughters, Lynn "Lovey" White knows that all of us, from time to time, need to use our little white lies. Her granddaughter Annabelle, on the other hand, is as truthful as they come. She always does the right thing - that is until she dumps her hedge fund manager fiance and marries a musician she has known for three days. After all, her grandparents fell in love at first sight....

AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR From the Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author, a hilarious, sharply drawn send-up of local politics A novel about a dark-horse candidate who risks his personal happiness for a career in the Texas House of Representatives "Required reading in...

Law school student Vivian Lynn Alexander could no longer fight the undeniable truth that she had to end her three-year love affair with her college sweetheart Carlton Andrews to have the career as a lawyer she dreamed about. Nor could she deny a growing interracial passion that she felt for former basketball icon Chuck Montgomery...that is, until she met his best friend Derrick “Dunk and Jam” Jackson, who was an even bigger star than Chuck.

Sometimes you have to forget all that you know...to learn how to love again. The player in the family, Jaxson goes through girlfriends faster than a hot knife through butter. A near fatal accident with a familiar face might be the very thing to give this cowboy a fresh take on love and loyalty. Jaxson locked his heart a long time ago and has no intention of opening it back up for anyone. Sure, he was heartbroken once when his ex-girlfriend Lemon betrayed him, but that was a lifetime ago. He has long since moved on. Then, why is he seeing Lemon? Was it her at the rodeo?

Acclaimed novelist Anne Rivers Siddons's new novel is a stunning tale of love and loss. For as long as she can remember, they were Cam and Lilly--happily married, totally in love with each other, parents of a beautiful family, and partners in life. Then, after decades of marriage, it ended as...

Trapped in a dead-end town, Justin Warren has had his life defined by the suspicious deaths of his grandparents. The unsolved crime happened long before Justin was born, but the ripple effects are still felt after thirty-eight years. Justin always knew he wouldn’t have much of a future. He just never imagined that his life might take him backward.

From an American master and author of Winter's Bone, this dark tragedy tells of a deadly dance hall fire and its impact over several generations. Alma DeGeer Dunahew, the mother of three young boys, works as the maid for a prominent citizen and his family in West Table, Missouri. Her husband is...

In small towns between the North Carolina Piedmont and the coast, the best scenery is often in the sky. On flat sweeps of red clay and scrub pine, the days move monotonously, safely, but above, in the blink of an eye, dangerous clouds can boil out of all four corners of the sky. The flat slow land starts to shiver and anything can happen. In such a storm, on Annie Peregrine’s seventh birthday, her father gave her the airplane and minutes later drove out of her life.

An epic literary debut that follows one family across four centuries, from France to Acadia to the bayous of Southern Louisiana—a poignant examination of belonging, place, and how individual, self-interested acts of moral compromise contribute to cycles of injustice and destruction. In...

Jesse Few peddles lies. His boss and clients order a couple. His married girlfriend gets a few. His family buys several. But he saves the top-of-the-line dishonesty to sell to himself. The 49-year-old suburban rogue focuses on carousing with his golf buddies, chasing women much too young for him, and surviving the Great Recession that’s raging across the South like it's the Big Banks March to the Sea.

On Fripp Island, where the daily tide swells and minnow counts are the biggest news, Janie Brooks lives in a beach bungalow next door to her mother, and her life is moving along at about the same slow pace as the island—exactly the way she wants it. After the death of her husband, she continues to follow her husband’s passion for island conservation and spends her days with the seagulls and swallow-tailed kites in the serene bliss of the Atlantic coast. Until newcomer Ryan Kennedy and his teenage daughter move into the rental down the street, shaking up Janie’s well-ordered life.

Set in the bucolic town of Angie, Louisiana, The Lord’s Acre tells the story of Eli Woodbine, a young boy who watches helplessly as his fundamentalist parents give in to their increasing sense of desperation and paranoia, living in a world where they can no longer see any hope or reason for existing. When the family is at their absolute lowest, they come across a local, charismatic church leader, in whom they quickly place all of their faith. Yet this man—known to them only as “Father”—is unlike anyone they have ever encountered before.