The Bright Years (Simon & Schuster 2025) by Sarah Damoff shimmers as an exquisite, poignant portrait of a family crumbling as their painful pasts push their way into the present. It is a story of addiction and recovery. Of love and loss. Of forgiveness and redemption. Set in Texas, The Bright Years takes readers on […]
Read of the Month: “Upon the Corner of the Moon” by Valerie Nieman
April 2, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Pagan rituals, visions and prophecies; commingling of myth, religion and history; poets, princes and perpetually plotting monarchs; sibling rivalry; siege and conquest. In her new novel Upon the Corner of the Moon (Regal House 2025), veteran North Carolina writer Valerie Nieman uses all this rich material—and more—to dramatize the backstory of two of Shakespeare’s most […]
Focus on Resource Extraction with “Beyond Buffalo” and “Filling the Big Empty”
March 6, 2025 by Leave a Comment
This month Southern Literary Review is focusing on the damage resource extraction causes to the environment and to people and the communities they live in. Two fine environmental novels share the honor of March Book of the Month. The first is Beyond Buffalo by Betsy Reeder. It shines a light on the psychological damage following […]
“Filling the Big Empty” by Rhonda Browning White
March 6, 2025 by Leave a Comment
It’s easy to understand why Rhonda Browning White’s debut novel, Filling the Big Empty (Redhawk Publications 2024) was shortlisted for the 2022 Neilson Prize. The novel is a tour-de-force, relentlessly examining environmental issues in Appalachia. While never losing focus on a young couple’s relationship, the story drops readers into the horrors of mountaintop removal to extract coal, the […]
“Beyond Buffalo” by Betsy Reeder
March 6, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Beyond Buffalo by Betsy Reeder takes readers beyond the deaths and physical destruction caused by the Buffalo Creek disaster to explore the long-term psychological impacts on survivors. The Buffalo Creek flood occurred in Logan County, West Virginia, on February 26, 1972, when three coal slurry impoundment dams fail during heavy rainfall, killing 125 and injuring 1,121. Over 4,000 were left homeless. But […]
Read of the Month: “Prodigal” by Phyllis Gobbell
February 4, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Fireworks, fireflies, and gunfire light up Phyllis Gobbell’s exquisite, poignant novel Prodigal (Histria Fiction 2024). This modern retelling of the prodigal son is, above all, a story of love and forgiveness in a Southern family. A Baptist preacher’s son, nineteen-year-old Connor Burdette flees from his hometown of Montpier, Tennessee, after a boy he is with […]