Jennifers Favorite Southern Fiction
Explore Jennifer's top picks for Southern fiction! Discover beloved books filled with rich storytelling, deep-rooted traditions, and captivating Southern charm.
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Secret Keepers
by Mindy Friddle
At age seventy-two, Emma Hanley plans to escape small-town Palmetto, South Carolina, and travel the globe. But when her fickle husband dies in undignified circumstances, Emma finds herself juggling the needs of her adult children. Her once free-spirited daughter Dora turns to compulsive shopping and a controlling husband to forget her wayward past. Her son Bobby still lives with her, afflicted with an illness that robbed him of his childhood promise. When Dora’s old flame Jake Cary returns to Palmetto with a broken heart and a gift for gardening, the town becomes filled with mysterious, potent botanicals and memories long forgotten. Soon enough, Jake and his ragtag group of helpers begin to unearth the secrets that have divided the Hanleys for decades. Written with the warmth of Lee Smith and the magical touch of Alice Hoffman, Secret Keepers is a beguiling second novel by the acclaimed author of The Garden Angel.
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The Garden Angel
by Mindy Friddle
Two women, both alienated from mainstream society, improbably connect and help to bring each other back to life in a small, down-at-the-heels Southern town in a memorable fiction debut.
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Serena
by Ron Rash
Penned by an award-winning writer, this Gothic tale of greed, corruption, and revenge is set against the backdrop of the 1930s wilderness and America's burgeoning environmental movement.
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Saints at the River
by Ron Rash
When a twelve-year-old girl drowns in the Tamassee River and her body is trapped in a deep eddy, the people of the small South Carolina town that bears the river's name are thrown into the national spotlight. The girl's parents want to attempt a rescue of the body; environmentalists are convinced the rescue operation will cause permanent damage to the river and set a dangerous precedent. Torn between the two sides is Maggie Glenn, a twenty-eight-year-old newspaper photographer who grew up in the town and has been sent to document the incident. Since leaving home almost ten years ago, Maggie has done her best to avoid her father, but now, as the town's conflict opens old wounds, she finds herself revisiting the past she's fought so hard to leave behind.
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Seek the Living
by Ashley Warlick
Acclaimed for creating young women of passion and spirit, Warlick lends her lyrical southern voice to Joan Patee, who is desperate to start a new family while trying to hold her own together.
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The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
by Joshilyn Jackson
Lauren Gray Hawthorne needs to make things pretty, whether she's helping her mother keep family skeletons in the closet or sewing her acclaimed art quilts. Her estranged sister, Thalia, is her opposite, an impoverished actress who prides herself on exposing the lurid truths lurking behind middle class niceties. While Laurel's life seems neatly on track-- a passionate marriage, a treasured daughter, a lovely suburban home-- everything she holds dear is threatened the night she is visited by the ghost of her 13-year-old neighbor Molly. The ghost leads Laurel to the real Molly, floating lifelessly in the Hawthorne's backyard pool. Molly's death is an unseemly mystery that no one in her whitewashed neighborhood is up to solving. Laurel enlists Thalia's help, even though she knows it comes with a high price tag. Together, they set out on a life-altering journey that triggers startling revelations about their family's haunted past, the true state of Laurel's marriage, and the girl who stopped swimming.
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Everything That Rises Must Converge
by Flannery O'Connor
Nine stories of the fierceness and struggle of life among white people in the new South.
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The Sweet In-between
by Sheri Reynolds
Desperate for a place to belong with her father in prison and her mother dead, teenager Kenny Lugo finds a less-than-idyllic home with her Aunt Glo, her father's struggling girlfriend, and her children, until she finds redemption from an unexpected source following the killing of a college girl in the house next door. By the author of Firefly Cloak. 25,000 first printing.
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Great with Child
by Beth Ann Fennelly
"May be the best book ever to give for a baby shower."—Tampa Tribune Beth Ann Fennelly, writing to a newly pregnant friend, goes beyond the nuts and bolts or sentimentality of other parenting literature, in letters that range in tone from serious to sisterly, from lighthearted to downright funny. Some answer specific questions; others muse about the identity shift a woman encounters when she enters Mommyland. This book invites all mothers to join the grand circle of giving and receiving advice about children.
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Brief Encounters with Che Guevara
by Ben Fountain
The well-meaning protagonists of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara are caught—to both disastrous and hilarious effect—in the maelstrom of political and social upheaval surrounding them. Ben Fountain's prize-winning debut speaks to the intimate connection between the foreign, the familiar, and the inescapably human.
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The Half-Mammals of Dixie
by George Singleton
This second collection of short stories by a bright star in Southern fiction showcases a town so tiny it missed the map, the gleefully off-the-wall Southerners who refuse to be pigeonholed, and a South far removed from big-city Atlanta and proper Charleston. As the author says of his characters, "They're regular people just trying to get by." Among them: a boy whose reputation is ruined when he appears in a head-lice documentary; a lovelorn father who woos his third-grader's teacher with creative show-and-tells; and a former pharmaceuticals salesman who waits for the word of God to tell him what to paint on next the "primitive" canvases he sells for big bucks to an art dealer.
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Collected Stories
by Carson McCullers
This collection of nineteen stories includes "Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland," "The Haunted Boy," "The Member of the Wedding," "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," several early stories, and other important works