October Books of Note: “Choose What You Want to Regret,” “The Swan House,” “Divided Loyalty,” and “The Leaving Gene”

Effective Leadership

Choose What You Want to Regret by Jim Murdaugh. (Sept. 2026) This book by Tallahassee State College president Jim Murdaugh gives both aspiring and veteran leaders a blueprint on how to elevate their leadership impact. His experience includes previous leadership roles in local law enforcement, state government and the military. Murdaugh’s 134-page book explores leadership effectiveness while giving individuals a guide to efficiently approaching decisions, challenges and opportunities.

A Georgia Classic Novel

This September marks the 25th anniversary edition of The Swan House by Elizabeth Musser, releasing with a new cover and an expanded author’s note. Set in 1962 Atlanta, it follows sixteen-year-old Mary Swan Middleton as a sudden family tragedy pulls her out of her sheltered, privileged world and into an unlikely friendship with Carl, a young man from the other side of the city’s divides, as together they investigate the disappearance of three famous paintings. It’s been named one of Georgia’s Top Ten Novels of the Past 100 Years, and Publishers Weekly praised how it “convincingly describes how religious faith satisfies the girl’s deepest longings” against a backdrop of racial turmoil and personal loss.

Revolutionary War History

Divided Loyalty reveals a Revolutionary War history too often left untold. Joseph McGill Jr. and Herb Frazier trace the experiences of Black patriots, Black loyalists, enslaved people seeking freedom, and Indigenous people navigating a conflict that divided South Carolina and reshaped a nation. Drawing on archival research, historic battlefields, descendants’ stories, and McGill’s travels with the Slave Dwelling Project, the authors show that the Revolution’s promise of liberty did not reach everyone equally. Some found freedom. Others remained enslaved or were re-enslaved. Native nations faced choices of their own as the Catawba, Cherokee, and others weighed alliances, survival, and the future of their lands. Centered on the people conventional Revolutionary histories have too often overlooked, Divided Loyalty offers a fuller and more complicated story of how American independence was won—and who was still waiting for freedom when the fighting ended.

Darkly Funny Essays

The Leaving Gene by Huck Smith is a darkly funny, candid memoir-in-essays about the patterns we inherit, the relationships we abandon, and the strange moment in middle age when the life we carefully built starts asking questions of its own. Moving through family, friendship, sex, loneliness, aging, queer life, and the indignities of an ordinary Tuesday, Smith resists tidy redemption and asks whether the life we learned to survive might finally be one worth staying for. For readers of David Sedaris, Samantha Irby, and Melissa Febos.