Southern Fiction Family

Bezellia Grove was born into the most prominent of Nashville families, but that didn’t stop her from having an alcoholic mother and a distant, adulterous father. Her nanny, Maizelle, and Nathaniel, the handyman, are the people who have taken care of her since she can remember. She considers them family, but her parents just consider them servants because they are Black. When Bezellia has a clandestine romance with Nathaniel's son, Whites and Blacks unite in fury at the young couple.

Overcome by "the pall", Henry seeks escape in a quest for love and purpose occasioned by a crisis in his company's fortunes. Dodging an Iago-like rival, he finds love with a colleague in his department, endangers his bond with his family, and finally confronts the single urgent question of his life.

Peyton is not ready to share her widowed father with anyone, let alone a barely remembered cousin who just rolled into town. However, her father seems to like Nora well enough, and prim Aunt Augusta hates her, which raises Nora slightly in Peyton's esteem. Maybe Nora is just what quiet Lytton, Georgia, needs this summer.

Julia Martin grew up wealthy, but it wasn’t until she met her husband, Jack, that she knew true happiness. He made her feel worthy and loved. Their marriage was also an escape from her sister’s bullying, her father’s scrutiny, and her chilly and enigmatic mother. But when tragedy strikes on the night she gives birth, Julia’s happiness is shattered. She has no choice but to return home to her family’s South Carolina mansion, where the grief and guilt buried in her mother’s past await her.

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.

When Jack Parker’s father dies, Jack knows one thing: Tom Parker was a good man. Beyond that, decades of distance and silence had kept the two men from truly knowing each other. Jack attends the funeral with the hope he can shovel some dirt onto Tom’s casket, collect a few commiserations, and put miles between himself and the questions he’d let simmer since he’d left home years before. But when a group of strangers appears at the funeral, Jack realizes he has more questions than answers about how his father actually lived his life.

Sylvie Snow knows the pressures of expectations: a woman is supposed to work hard, but never be tired; age gracefully, but always be beautiful; fix the family problems, but always be carefree. Sylvie does the grocery shopping, the laundry, the scheduling, the schlepping, and the PTA-ing, while planning her son’s Bar Mitzvah and cheerfully tending her husband, Paul, who’s been lying on the sofa with a broken ankle.

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.

A family emergency brings former rapper and current real estate mogul Ivan Spencer back to his long-abandoned hometown. While there, he must deal with his confused mother, his elderly, philandering father, his flaky sister, an unreliable aunt, and a face from the past who makes him question some of his earlier decisions. All he wants to do is to get things squared away and return to his life, but as it turns out, he must deal with his own issues first.

At 12, Peyton McKenzie isn't ready to share her widowed father with anyone, let alone Nora, her redheaded, cigarette-smoking cousin who just rolled into town behind the wheel of a pink Thunderbird. But her father seems to like Nora, and she does make for good conversation with her friends at the Losers Club, and prim Aunt Augusta hates her, which means she can't be all bad. In fact, maybe Nora is just what quiet Lytton, Georgia, needs this summer.

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.

Sharyn McCrumb is the New York Times best-selling author of the Ballad novels, which celebrate the rich history of Appalachia. An elegant saga set against the American Revolution, King' s Mountain features John Sevier and his legendary Carolina Overmountain Men, who find themselves defending their families and farms against the troops of a haughty British major.

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.

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.

The Powell brothers - Muir and Moody - are as different as Cain and Abel. Muir is an innocent, a shy young man with big dreams. Moody, the older and wilder brother - embittered by the death of his father, by years of fighting his mother, and by his jealousy of Muir's place in the family - takes to moonshine and gambling and turns his anger on his brother. Muir escapes by wandering, making his way around the country in attempts to find something - an occupation, a calling - to match his ambition.

Jim Byrd died. Technically. For a few minutes. The diagnosis: heart attack at age 30. Revived with no memory of any tunnels, lights, or angels, Jim wonders what—if anything—awaits us on the other side. Then a ghost shows up. Maybe. Jim and his new wife, Annie, find themselves tangling with holograms, psychics, messages from the beyond, and a machine that connects the living and the dead. As Jim and Annie journey through history and fumble through faith, they confront the specter of loss that looms for anyone who dares to fall in love.

An Iraq War veteran turned small-town homemaker, Colleen works hard to keep her deployment behind her - until pregnancy brings her buried trauma to the surface. She hides her mounting anxiety from her husband, Derby, who is in turn preoccupied with the retrial of his father, Hare Hobbs, for a decades-old civil rights-era murder. Colleen and Derby's community, including the descendants of the murder victim, still grapple with the fallout; Corrections Officer Doc and his wife, Jessica, have built their life in the shadow of this violent act.

After their father dies in a tragic accident, heiresses Evelyn, Georgia and Olivia Belle are left with a massive hole in their finances. With the world's media and National Crime Agency looking on, their family home, cars, and other assets are sold at auction, leaving the sisters penniless, homeless, and jobless. Shunned by their celebrity friends, the sisters must learn to fend for themselves for the first time in their lives.

For twelve-year-old Martha "Sonny" Creech, there is no place more beautiful than her family's cotton farm. She, her two brothers, and her parents work hard on their land - hoeing, planting, picking - but only Sonny loves the rich, dark earth the way her father does. When a tragic accident claims his life, her stricken family struggles to fend off ruin - until their rich, reclusive neighbor offers to help finance that year's cotton crop.

In Bonnet, Texas, Liddy Latham, the queen of funeral dinners, keeps a Southern comfort-food tradition alive - until fancy-schmancy Matilda Monroe moves back to town. She wants room at the table for her own style of consolation and closure: healthy, modern, and vegan. But this is about more than fried chicken versus tofu turkey. Matilda’s return is also stirring up their volatile, unresolved history. And just when they thought it couldn’t get more personal.