Southern Fiction Family

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.

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.

In 1913, on a summer's day at Half Moon Lake, Louisiana, four-year-old Sonny Davenport walks into the woods and never returns. The boy's mysterious disappearance from the family's lake house makes front-page news in their home town of Opelousas. John Henry and Mary Davenport are wealthy and influential, and will do anything to find their son. For two years, the Davenports search across the South, offer increasingly large rewards, and struggle not to give in to despair.

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.

Siblings Bert, Willet, and Pansy know better than to go swimming at the old rock quarry. According to their father, it's the Devil's place, a place that's been cursed and forgotten. But Mississippi Delta summer days are scorching hot, and they can't resist cooling off in the dark, bottomless water - until the day six-year-old Pansy vanishes...not drowned, not lost, simply gone. When their father disappears as well, Bert and Willet leave their childhoods behind to try and hold their broken family together.

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.

In the South, we believe in being polite, even if it kills us. So, when we just can't fight the urge to say something nasty, we follow it up with a "bless her heart" just to make us feel better. "Look at that poor woman trying to jog around that track. Her rear-end is dragging a trail, bless her heart." Youngblood and Poole talk about the ins and outs of nosy neighbors, sibling rivalry, and why every Southerner worth her salt feels the need to offer advice.

While Laurel Gray Hawthorne's life seems neatly on track - a passionate marriage, a treasured daughter, and a lovely home in suburban Victorianna - everything she holds dear is suddenly thrown into question the night she is visited by the ghost of a her 13-year old neighbor, Molly Dufresne.

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.

The heart has a home when it has an ally. If Millie Crossan doesn't know anything else, she knows this one truth simply because her brother Finley grew up beside her. Charismatic Finley, 18 months her senior, becomes Millie's guide when their mother Posey leaves their father and moves her children from Minnesota to Memphis shortly after Millie's 10th birthday. Memphis is a world foreign to Millie and Finley. This is the 1970s Memphis, the genteel world of their mother's upbringing and vastly different from anything they've ever known. Here they are the outsiders.

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.

In small towns between the North Carolina Piedmont and the coast, the best scenery is often in the sky. On flat sweeps of red clay and scrub pine, the days move monotonously, safely, but above, in the blink of an eye, dangerous clouds can boil out of all four corners of the sky. The flat slow land starts to shiver and anything can happen. In such a storm, on Annie Peregrine’s seventh birthday, her father gave her the airplane and minutes later drove out of her life.

When Charlie Boykin was young, he thought his life with his single mother on the working-class side of Nashville was perfectly fine. But when his mother arranges for him to be admitted as a scholarship student to an elite private school, he is suddenly introduced to what the world can feel like to someone cushioned by money. That world, he discovers, is an almost irresistible place where one can bend—and break—rules and still end up untarnished.

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.

Meet Miriam Elizabeth Swanson, in a full-blown snit, buoyed by a fabulous cast who run the gamut from insufferable to wonderful. First is the arrival of Liz Harper, Miriam's tenant from Birmingham, who sets a new cycle in motion. Then her other tenant, Kevin, a stalwart companion with more style than Cary Grant, shakes Miriam out of her fog to see which battles are worth the fight. Next, her estranged son announces he's marrying a Jamaican woman. And what about her ex-husband, Charles, and that sordid lingerie model of his?

Elizabeth Passarella grew up in Memphis in a conservative Republican family with a Christian mom and a Jewish dad. Then she moved to New York, fell in love with the city - and, eventually, her husband - and changed. Sort of. While her politics have tilted to the left, she still puts her faith first - and argues that the two can go hand in hand, for what it’s worth. In this sharp and slyly profound memoir, Elizabeth shares stories and upends stereotypes about Southerners, New Yorkers, and Christians, making a case that we are all flawed humans simply doing our best.

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.

The Best of Me: Booktrack Edition adds an immersive musical soundtrack to your audiobook listening experience! Get swept up in a timeless story of lost dreams and redemption, in which former high school sweethearts get a second chance at first love - from the number one New York Times best-selling author of The Notebook.

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.