Here are some notable Southern books coming out this Fall season.
Currently living in Virginia, Barbara Kingsolver returns with a dynamic retelling of Dicken’s David Copperfield. Demon Copperhead (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, $32.50) will be out October 18.
Her publisher says: “Demon Copperhead is set in the mountains of southern Appalachia. It’s the story of a boy born to a single teenage mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.”
Buy a copy at The Bookshop.
American writing legend Cormac McCarthy returns after too many years with his next novel in two volumes. The first, The Passengers (Knopf, $30), and then Stella Maris is coming out later.
His publisher says: “1980, Pass Christian, Mississippi: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit–by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.”
Buy a copy at The Bookshop.
UVA professor Bruce Holsinger‘s new book is based on his own experience. The Displacements (Riverhead Books, $27) is thrilling and a much better version of those “stuck on an island” shows.
His publisher says: “To all appearances, the Larsen-Hall family has everything: healthy children, a stable marriage, a lucrative career for Brantley, and the means for Daphne to pursue her art full-time. Their deluxe new Miami life has just clicked into place when Luna—the world’s first category 6 hurricane—upends everything they have taken for granted. When the storm makes landfall, it triggers a descent of another sort. Their home destroyed, two of its members missing, and finances abruptly cut off, the family finds everything they assumed about their lives now up for grabs. Swept into a mass rush of evacuees from across the American South, they are transported hundreds of miles to a FEMA megashelter where their new community includes an insurance-agent-turned-drug dealer, a group of vulnerable children, and a dedicated relief worker trying to keep the peace.
Buy a copy at The Bookshop.
Virginian Beth Macy‘s Raising Lazarus (Little Brown, $30) follows up where Dopesick left off. In a lecture at the Library of Virginia, she said: “Everyone experiences addiction differently, people should have the choice of what treatment they want. […] Stigma is what’s killing people, what’s at the heart of the current problem.”
Her publisher says: “Nearly a decade into the second wave of America’s overdose crisis, pharmaceutical companies have yet to answer for the harms they created. As pending court battles against opioid makers, distributors, and retailers drag on, addiction rates have soared to record-breaking levels during the COVID pandemic, illustrating the critical need for leadership, urgency, and change. Meanwhile, there is scant consensus between law enforcement and medical leaders, nor an understanding of how to truly scale the programs that are out there, working at the ragged edge of capacity and actually saving lives.”
Buy a copy at The Bookshop.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Forrest Gander‘s new collection of poetry, Knot (Copper Canyon Press, $25), is paired with startling and intriguing photography by Jack Shear.
His publisher says: “The elements are timeless and fundamental—a male nude and a piece of black linen—and the photographic results are miraculous. Within Knot are twenty-three lush black and white photographs of a body and cloth performing a provocative ballet, a wrestling match, a tense sequence of appearances and disappearances that immediately take on symbolic weight. When poet Forrest Gander first encountered these images, he asked Jack Shear for more. As Gander recalls, the photographs arrived ‘dreamy, violent, mythic, and elemental… I set them up around the room and knew I wanted to write my way into them.’”
Buy a copy at The Bookstop.
Currently living in Georgia, Andy Davidson‘s new thrilling gothic novel, The Hollow Kind (MCD, $28), will delight readers who loved his previous work.
His publisher says: “Nellie Gardner is looking for a way out of an abusive marriage when she learns that her long-lost grandfather, August Redfern, has willed her his turpentine estate. She throws everything she can think of in a bag and flees to Georgia with her eleven-year-old son, Max, in tow. It turns out that the estate is a decrepit farmhouse on a thousand acres of old pine forest, but Nellie is thrilled about the chance for a fresh start for her and Max, and a chance for the happy home she never had. So it takes her a while to notice the strange scratching in the walls, the faint whispering at night, how the forest is eerily quiet. But Max sees what his mother can’t: They’re no safer here than they had been in South Carolina.”
Buy a copy at The Bookshop.
Local author Clay McLeod Chapman‘s Ghost Eaters (Quirk Books, $21.99) is all about the haunts that spirits roam and what we do to our bodies (like taking drugs…). See our interview with the author later this month!
His publisher says: “Erin hasn’t been able to set a single boundary with her charismatic but reckless college ex-boyfriend, Silas. When he asks her to bail him out of rehab—again—she knows she needs to cut him off. But days after he gets out, Silas turns up dead of an overdose in their hometown of Richmond, Virginia, and Erin’s world falls apart. Then a friend tells her about Ghost, a new drug that allows users to see the dead. Wanna get haunted? he asks. Grieving and desperate for closure with Silas, Erin agrees to a pill-popping “séance.” But the drug has unfathomable side effects—and once you take it, you can never go back.”
Buy a copy at The Bookshop.
Following up her 2021 Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel Palmares (and that after a 21-year hiatus), Gayl Jones‘ The Birdcatcher (Beacon Press, $24.95) follows a female artist with a penchant for sculpture and death.
Her publisher says: “Set primarily on the island of Ibiza, the story is narrated by the writer Amanda Wordlaw, whose closest friend, a gifted sculptor named Catherine Shuger, is repeatedly institutionalized for trying to kill a husband who never leaves her. The three form a quirky triangle on the white-washed island.”
Buy a copy at The Bookshop.
