Southern Literary Fiction

In 1788, Thomas Kendall, a naïve 19-year-old sentenced to transportation for burglary, finds himself bound for Sydney Town and a new life in the wild and lawless land beneath the Southern Cross. Thomas fathers a dynasty that will last more than 200 years. His descendants play their part in the forging of a nation, but greed and prejudice see an irreparable rift in the family which will echo through the generations. It is only at the dawn of the new millennium - as an old journal lays bare a terrible secret - that the family can finally reclaim its honour....

The Center for women's reproductive health offers a last chance at hope - but nobody ends up there by choice. Its very existence is controversial, and to the demonstrators who barricade the building every day, the service it offers is no different from legalised murder. Now life and death decisions are being made horrifyingly real: a lone protester with a gun has taken the staff, patients and visitors hostage.

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilisation. This is the twelfth expedition. Their group is made up of four women: An anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

Welcome to Lemon Bliss, Louisiana, where an abandoned lemon tea factory is the most happening place in town and witches secretly rule the roost. Violet Broussard gets called back to the hometown she left in the dust when a dead body is found in the abandoned factory bequeathed to her by her grandmother. Violet has plans, and they most definitely don't involve staying in Lemon Bliss any longer than necessary. The town is mostly famous for its lemon tea infused with enough alcohol to make one experience bliss, hence the town's name. Yet, once she's there, things get a tad wacky.

In 1788, Thomas Kendall, a naive nineteen-year-old sentenced to transportation for burglary, finds himself bound for Sydney Town in the penal colony of New South Wales. Discarding allegiance to the country that has disowned him, Thomas, an honest man at heart, seizes a second chance and begins a new life in the wild and lawless land beneath the Southern Cross. Thomas Kendall fathers a dynasty that will last beyond 200 years.

Lily has grown up believing she accidentally killed her mother when she was four. She not only has her own memory of holding the gun, but her father's account of the event. Now 14, she yearns for her mother, and for forgiveness. Living on a peach farm in South Carolina with her father, she has only one friend: Rosaleen, a black servant whose sharp exterior hides a tender heart. South Carolina in the '60s is a place where segregation is still considered a cause worth fighting for.

1980, Pass Christian, Mississippi: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His divelight 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 flightbag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how?

Jimmy is a kid growing up fast on the poorest street in town. He tries to do everything right and look out for his mum and his younger brother. His older brother is in jail, so it's up to Jimmy to hold things together. But small-town life is unforgiving if you're from the other side of the tracks.

In Kentucky, back in 1933, Carol's daddy lost his 13-year-old daughter in a game of cards. Award-winning author Simon Van Booy's spellbinding novel spans decades as he tells the story of Carol and the people in her life. Incidents intersect and lives unexpectedly change course in this masterfully interwoven story of chance and choice that leads home again to a night blessed with light.

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to 12 years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding.

Stella Maris is the story of a mathematician, twenty years old, admitted to the hospital with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag and one request: She does not want to talk about her brother.

As a child Gifty would ask her parents to tell the story of their journey from Ghana to Alabama, seeking escape in myths of heroism and romance. When her father and brother succumb to the hard reality of immigrant life in the American South, their family of four becomes two - and the life Gifty dreamed of slips away. Years later, desperate to understand the opioid addiction that destroyed her brother's life, she turns to science for answers. But when her mother comes to stay, Gifty soon learns that the roots of their tangled traumas reach farther than she ever thought.

Jo and Bethie Kaufman were born into a world full of promise. Growing up in 1950s Detroit, they live in a perfect 'Dick and Jane' house, where their roles in the family are clearly defined. Jo is the tomboy, the bookish rebel with a passion to make the world more fair; Bethie is the pretty, feminine good girl, a would-be star who enjoys the power her beauty confers and dreams of a traditional life.

The girl everybody loves to hate has returned to the town she'd sworn to leave behind forever. As the rich, spoiled princess of Parrish, Mississippi, Sugar Beth Carey had broken hearts, ruined friendships, and destroyed reputations. But 15 years have passed, and now she's come home - broke, desperate, and too proud to show it. The people of Parrish don't believe in forgive and forget. But none of them have reckoned on the unexpected strength of a woman who's learned survival the hard way.

Joan was only a child the last time she visited Memphis. She doesn't remember the bustle of Beale Street on a summer's night. She doesn't know she's as likely to hear a gunshot ring out as the sound of children playing. How the smell of honeysuckle is almost overwhelming as she climbs the porch steps to the house where her mother grew up. But when the front door opens, she does remember Derek. This house full of history is home to the women of the North family.

Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel is a classic of 20th-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a 22-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a “blind” street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel founds The Church of God Without Christ but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God.

Fannie Flagg gives us a story of richly human characters, the saving graces of the once-maligned middle classes and small-town life, and the daily contest between laughter and tears.

William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), the first novel written by an African American, was published in London while Brown was still legally regarded as property within the borders of the United States. The novel was inspired by the story of Thomas Jefferson's purported sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. Brown fictionalizes the stories of Jefferson's mistress, daughters, and granddaughters, all of whom are slaves in order to demythologize the dominant U.S. cultural narrative celebrating Jefferson's America as a nation of freedom and equality for all.

Callum, a seasoned horse thief at 15 years old, came to America from his native Ireland as an orphan. Ava, her father and brother lost to the war, hides in her crumbling home until Callum determines to rescue her from the bands of hungry soldiers pillaging the land, leaving destruction in their wake. Ava and Callum have only each other in the world and their remarkable horse, Reiver, who carries them through the destruction that is the South.

The Kingston Trio’s folk song “Tom Dooley” tells the story of the murder of Laura Foster, a simple country girl involved with returning Confederate soldier Tom Dula. But Tom was also engaged in a passionate affair with his childhood sweetheart, the beautiful - and married - Ann Melton. One May morning in 1866, Laura Foster stole her father’s horse and left home, telling a neighbor that she was eloping to Tennessee. Three months later, her body was found in a shallow grave only a few hundred yards from where she was last seen.