Southern Fiction Family

Dear friends and army wives Diana, Carmen, and Joanie have been through war, rumors of war, marital problems, motherhood, fears, joy, and heartache. But none of the women are prepared when their daughters decide to enlist in the army together. Facing an empty nest won’t be easy. Especially for Carmen. With emotions already high, she suffers an even greater blow: divorce papers. Diana understands the fury and tears. She’s been there.

When a music festival rolls through the sleepy town of Hesterville, Georgia, the Dixon family’s lives are forever changed. On the final night, a storm muffles the sound of the blaring music, and Rachel tucks her baby into bed before falling into a deep sleep. So deep, she doesn’t hear the kitchen door opening. When she and her husband wake up in the morning, the crib is empty. Emily is gone. Vicki Robart is one of the thousands at the festival, but she’s not feeling the music. She’s feeling the emptiness over the loss of her own baby several months before.

Law school student Vivian Lynn Alexander could no longer fight the undeniable truth that she had to end her three-year love affair with her college sweetheart Carlton Andrews to have the career as a lawyer she dreamed about. Nor could she deny a growing interracial passion that she felt for former basketball icon Chuck Montgomery...that is, until she met his best friend Derrick “Dunk and Jam” Jackson, who was an even bigger star than Chuck.

In Beneath The Willow Tree, the eighth book in the South Carolina Sunsets series, listeners are introduced to two women who have inherited a beachfront home in Seagrove. These two women were raised by the same foster mother but despised each other. The twist is that the foster mother's will states that the two women must work together and use the home for a good cause to inherit it. They must then decide whether to keep the home and live there together or sell it and split the proceeds.

Dixie has a boyfriend, and she's hiding him from everybody. William gets a job offer and has a big decision to make. Dawson has a huge announcement. Colleen gets the shock of her life. Julie adjusts to being a grandmother. Meg and Christian start building a life together. Someone unexpected comes to town and decides not to leave.

It’s been years since Dr. Imani Kemp has returned home to Peachtree Cove, Georgia. As Tallahassee’s most sought-after OB-GYN, she doesn’t have much time for anything else. But when her mom announces she’s marrying a man she just met on a dating app, Imani knows she has to put a stop to it immediately. Let her mom be hurt again after the disastrous way her last marriage ended? Absolutely not. Always her protector, Imani won’t rest until her mom sees reason. She just never expected sparks to fly with the groom’s son.

In this riveting continuation of the Brisco family saga, brothers Dub and Tim strive to persevere against their early 1900s post-slavery beginnings—clashing with their history of family trauma and their different coping mechanisms for living in a world that doesn’t accept them. While Dub becomes a respected coal miner and finds prosperity for his family, Tim continues a slow descent into a fog of psychosis, alcoholism, and perpetual joblessness—forced to live an isolated existence on Dub’s property despite his desire for deeper connection.

When Meg shows up at her mother's door, she has no idea how to break the news to her. She's come home from France, pregnant. At just nineteen years old, this wasn't where she saw her life going. Now, trying to hide her growing belly and figure out her next decision, she moves in with her mother, sister and aunt on Seabreeze Island. But, how long can she keep her pregnancy a secret, and what happens if another surprising person shows up at the front door of Julie's house?

Bailey thought she’d gotten her happy ending. She is married to the man she loves, she has started a family, and her design business is flourishing. But when Bailey’s ex-husband, a famous TV chef, is found murdered with her DNA all over his apartment and body, she is suddenly facing murder charges in a high-profile case. Already burdened by the demands and challenges of marriage, motherhood, and her career, Bailey now must do everything she can to prove her innocence. But it’s the ones she thought would surely be on her side who might be doubting her innocence the most.

Owen Cross’s father is a hard man, proud in his brokenness, who wants nothing more than for Owen to succeed where he failed. With his innate talents and his father’s firm hand guiding him, Owen goes to college with dreams of the major leagues—and an emptiness full of a girl named Micky Dullahan. Owen loved Micky from the first time they met on the hill between their two worlds: his middle-class home and her troubled Shantytown. Years later he leaves her for the dugouts and the autographs, but their days together follow him.

On Fripp Island, where the daily tide swells and minnow counts are the biggest news, Janie Brooks lives in a beach bungalow next door to her mother, and her life is moving along at about the same slow pace as the island—exactly the way she wants it. After the death of her husband, she continues to follow her husband’s passion for island conservation and spends her days with the seagulls and swallow-tailed kites in the serene bliss of the Atlantic coast. Until newcomer Ryan Kennedy and his teenage daughter move into the rental down the street, shaking up Janie’s well-ordered life.

Set in the bucolic town of Angie, Louisiana, The Lord’s Acre tells the story of Eli Woodbine, a young boy who watches helplessly as his fundamentalist parents give in to their increasing sense of desperation and paranoia, living in a world where they can no longer see any hope or reason for existing. When the family is at their absolute lowest, they come across a local, charismatic church leader, in whom they quickly place all of their faith. Yet this man—known to them only as “Father”—is unlike anyone they have ever encountered before.

Lexi Stewart’s lineage extends to the founders of the MacInnes legacy in faraway America. A year has passed since she was widowed much too young, but she’s floundering, so she accepts an invitation to escape her beloved Scotland for a needed respite. Surely a visit with her Texas relatives and a stay at Castle MacInnes will put her back to rights. There’s just one problem: Logan Jameson. The handsome personal trainer is getting everyone in Magnolia Bloom on a fitness kick, and he's determined to make her believe she’s not too old or too heavy to find love again.

By late 1936, the worst years of the Great Depression are over. Wealth has created new opportunities for Minnie: a beautiful home in California, a luxury car, the yearning desire by a handsome lieutenant, and the family’s summer retreat, which draws her like a magnet. Secrets abound. A hidden bohemian community of writers, poets, artists, and escapists is scattered across the shifting coastal dunes near the cottage.

Leaving the parsonage means Leona will need a new home to call her own. Complicated finances force Leona to work with Saul Levy, but she refuses to allow the uptight lawyer to impede her makeover plans. When a handsome old friend blows into town, Leona is faced with her toughest decision yet. Save the world, or dare to dance with a very unlikely partner?

It's November 1, 1961, in a small town in South Carolina, and nuclear war is coming. Ten-year-old Wilson Porter believes this with every fiber of his being. He prowls his neighborhood for Communists and studies fallout pamphlets and the habits of his father, a scientist at the nuclear plant in town. Meanwhile, his mother Nellie covertly joins an anti-nuclear movement led by angry housewives-and his father, Dean, must decide what to do with the damning secrets he's uncovered at the nuclear plant. When tragedy strikes, the Porter family must learn to confront their fears.

Rose Mae Lolley is a fierce and dirty girl, long-suppressed under flowery skirts and bow-trimmed ballet flats. As "Mrs. Ro Grandee" she's trapped in a marriage that's thick with love and sick with abuse. Her true self has been bound in the chains of marital bliss in rural Texas, letting "Ro" make eggs, iron shirts, and take her punches.

At 12, Emily Parmenter is left mostly to herself after her mother disappears and her beloved older brother dies. Emily has built a life around the faded plantation where her remote father and hunting-obsessed brothers raise hunting spaniels. It is a meager, masculine world, but to Emily it has magic. And then comes Lulu Foxworth, troubled daughter of a truly grand plantation, who has run away from her hectic Charleston debutante season.

When a black boy named Paris saves Trudy from being crushed by a runaway Sunbeam Bread truck, they become friends. Navigating a multi-racial friendship in 1964 is no easy thing, however. The racism they encounter inspires them to go on an audacious adventure: to take down the Confederate flag that flies atop the South Carolina State House. And they can't do it without the help of Trudy's grandmother, Ida.

Minnie leaves boarding school to spend the summer at The Big House, her cherished Grandpa's home. She enjoys adventure, but she also learns of the dangers posed by the land and a river that can seduce the unwary. The arrival of Minnie's great-grandmother provides her with a fearless female role model as well as tales of the elderly woman's antebellum past and how she survived the Civil War.