Southern Fiction Family

The Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch and pillar of the community Minnie Mae, is plagued by old secrets and embarrassment over mental illness and illegitimacy. Meanwhile, single mother Francine Clark is haunted by her dead, lightning-struck husband and forced to fight against both the moral judgment of the community and her own rebellious daughter, Mona. The residents of Opulence struggle with vexing relationships to the land, to one another, and to their own sexuality.

Eight-year-old Tessa Lee and her little brother, Travis, are left at a campground by their mother and her boyfriend, a crooked-nosed man named Goose. All the two children have is a tent, their bags of clothes, the firefly cloak they'd used for covers the night before, and a phone number printed in magic marker on Travis' back. Tessa Lee knows that her momma and Goose have skedaddled in a car with recently changed license plates. She just doesn't know why.

In the tradition of his beloved first novel, The Notebook, number-one New York Times best-selling author Nicholas Sparks brings listeners the remarkable story of two couples whose lives intersect in profound and surprising ways.

In the South, you always say “yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am.” You know everybody’s business. Football is a lifestyle, not a pastime. Food — especially dessert — is almost a religious experience. And you protect your friends as fiercely as you protect your family — even if the threat is something you cannot see.

Returning home to Ditto, Texas, is bittersweet for Lila Matthews. Her dear and feisty aunt Gracie has passed away, leaving Lila her estate. That includes a centuries-old house, a field of the freshest strawberries in Atascosa County, more money than Lila can count, and a secret Aunt Gracie took to her grave. All the angels in heaven won’t be able to pry it out of her.

No one knows why Dixie’s son is standing there, on Christmas Day, no less. And he doesn’t look happy. Dixie is keeping a big secret that will shake up everyone around her. Julie’s daughter, Colleen, is coming home for a visit, but she’s not alone. Janine makes a new friend, but nobody is thrilled about it. Julie and Dawson question their budding relationship. Will they move forward or decide that being friends is the best way to go? There’s so much happening on this little island, including the return of Julie’s ex husband and a shocking surprise at the end.

On a rainy October night in Kentucky, recently divorced therapist Tallie Clark is on her way home from work when she spots a man precariously standing at the edge of a bridge. Without a second thought, Tallie pulls over and jumps out of the car into the pouring rain. She convinces the man to join her for a cup of coffee, and he eventually agrees to come back to her house, where he finally shares his name: Emmett.

In this number one New York Times best-selling novel of first love and second chances, former high school sweethearts confront the painful truths of their past to build a promising future - together. "Everyone wanted to believe that endless love was possible. She'd believed in it once, too, back when she was 18". In the spring of 1984, high school students Amanda Collier and Dawson Cole fell deeply, irrevocably in love. Though they were from opposite sides of the tracks, their love for one another seemed to defy the realities of life in their small town in North Carolina.

Hilton Head, a South Carolina retirement heaven - at least it's supposed to be, but for Big Al and Connie Russo, the move from New Jersey to this Southern paradise has been fraught with just a few complications. Especially for their daughter, Grace. Well, that's what she likes to be called. Her family insists on Maria Graziella. Seriously, enough with the Neapolitan. That might have been okay in New Jersey, but now it's just plain silly, and Grace, at 32 is - horror of horrors - still unmarried.

The town of Red Bluff, Mississippi, has seen better days, though those who've held on have little memory of when that was. Myer, the county's aged, sardonic lawman, still thinks it can prove itself - when confronted by a strange family of drifters, the sheriff believes that the people of Red Bluff can be accepting, rational, even good. The opposite is true: This is a landscape of fear and ghosts - of regret and violence - transformed by the kudzu vines that have enveloped the hills around it, swallowing homes, cars, rivers, and hiding a terrible secret deeper still.

Molly Bell Redwine was raised to believe that nothing is more important than "The Family". But everything Molly values is challenged when her domineering mother dies, her husband leaves her for a younger woman, and her Atlanta family scatters to the four winds. She takes refuge by visiting friends in Martha's Vineyard, a very different world that hastens her changing identity.

Talk of impending war is a steady drumbeat throughout North Carolina, though Joetta McBride pays it little heed. She and her husband, Ennis, have built a modest but happy life for themselves, raising two sons, fifteen-year-old Henry, and eleven-year-old Robert, on their small subsistence farm. They do not support the Confederacy's position on slavery, but Joetta considers her family to be neutral, believing this is simply not their fight. Her opinion is not favored by many in their community, including Joetta's own father-in-law, Rudean.

Michael Vargas is living the life of a celebrity architect when his world collapses. He walks away from the glamorous career of the star architect and begins a quest that will take him 23 years back in time. The challenge his mentor presented at the time is beckoning Michael back to the South - his home, a place he loved and hated.

For as long as she could remember, Susannah Faulkner knew that even though she lived a dangerous and violent life, she would try her best to do some good in the world. She’s hunted down evil men before, but the one man that puts fear into her heart, the one man who could destroy everything she loves, is the one man she cannot track down. And worst of all, she doesn’t know what will happen when she finds him...or if he finds her first.

Trapped in a dead-end town, Justin Warren has had his life defined by the suspicious deaths of his grandparents. The unsolved crime happened long before Justin was born, but the ripple effects are still felt after thirty-eight years. Justin always knew he wouldn’t have much of a future. He just never imagined that his life might take him backward.

Celia Fairchild, known as advice columnist "Dear Calpurnia", has insight into everybody’s problems—except her own. Still bruised by the end of a marriage she thought was her last chance to create a family, Celia receives an unexpected answer to a “Dear Birthmother” letter. Celia throws herself into proving she’s a perfect adoptive mother material—with a stable home and income—only to lose her job. Her one option: sell the Charleston house left to her by her recently departed, estranged Aunt Calpurnia.

At thirty-two, Jillian Parrish finally finds the courage to put herself in the driver’s seat of her life. Pregnant and recently divorced, she and her seven-year-old daughter find refuge and solace on Pawleys Island, South Carolina—Jillian’s only source of happy childhood memories. Summers spent at her grandmother’s beach house had been Jillian’s sanctuary from indifferent parents—until her best friend Lauren Mills disappeared, never to be found.

This story of a young woman's confrontation with death and her past is a poetic study of human relations.

Victor Chin’s life is turned upside down at the tender age of 15. Diagnosed with Hansen’s disease, otherwise known as leprosy, he’s forced to leave the familiar confines of his father’s laundry business in the Bronx–the only home he’s known since emigrating from China with his older brother—to quarantine alongside patients from all over the country at a federal institution in Carville. At first, Victor is scared not only of the disease, but of the confinement, and wants nothing more than to flee.

Since Bailey Rae Rigby’s adoptive aunt Winnie passed, Bent Oak, South Carolina, doesn’t have much of a hold on her anymore. So it seems. Bailey Rae aims to settle the small estate and, armed with her aunt’s inspiring personal cookbook, buy a food truck with an ocean view in Myrtle Beach. Everything goes awry when a distraught young mother arrives in town clutching a copy of that same cookbook. Embedded inside is a code that promises a safe place in Bent Oak for desperate women on the run. For Bailey Rae it opens up a world of questions.