Pat Conroy’s Lowcountry (History Press 2026) by Lynn Seldon offers a literary travel guide to the Lowcountry of South Carolina and a glimpse into the Lowcountry heart of the incomparable author of The Prince of Tides. As a longtime friend and sometime neighbor of Pat Conroy and his wife, fellow novelist Cassandra King, Seldon is perfectly […]
October Read of the Month: “The Nurse at Baker Hospital” by Jocelyn Cullity
October 7, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Horrifying. Haunting. Gut-wrenching. All of these describe The Nurse at Baker Hospital (Regal, October 2026) by Jocelyn Cullity. Drawing on primary sources, the novel meets the highest standards of historical fiction while reading with the urgency of a thriller. Though the events are rooted in the past, the lessons they offer are not merely relevant—they […]
“A Time of Witches” by Madeline Martin
October 4, 2026 by Leave a Comment
A Time of Witches (Hanover Square Press/HarperCollins, 2026) by USA Today bestselling author Madeline Martin is an intense, spellbinding dual-timeline novel about magic, love, and the power of sisterhood. The contemporary story is set in Savannah, while the older story is set in 16th-century England during the time of the Hopkins witch trials, also known […]
“Keeper of Lost Children” by Sadeqa Johnson
October 4, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Keeper of Lost Children (Simon & Schuster, 2026) by Sadeqa Johnson is an excellent historical novel of warmth and transcendence about three Black people who overcome great odds in the decades after WWII. At the heart of the novel, Ethel Gathers, the proud wife of an American military officer, is living in Occupied Germany in […]
“Happy Happy,” a novel by Corey Mesler
October 4, 2026 by Leave a Comment
When I first began reading Happy Happy (Livingston Press 2026), I wondered why my friend Corey Mesler didn’t write this book as a memoir, instead of a novel. He explains why it would have been more difficult to write the painful aspects of his struggles as memoir, but his fiction version is so powerful, so […]
“When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women” by Ellen Morris Prewitt
September 22, 2026 by Leave a Comment
One of the aspects I love most about Southern literature is its deep sense of place. This novel is no different. New Orleans was a perfectly chosen setting for this genre-bending tale. Like the city itself, with its legends, ghosts, history, and beliefs, When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women by Ellen Morris Prewitt draws on elements of […]