The Best Southern Books of July 2024 https://ift.tt/GePHMSw
It’s really hot and really weird out there, y’all. I’m so thankful to have this opportunity at the SRB to keep talking about the stories, places, and people that I love. It’s important to read stories that are truly representative of the wild, wonderful, and very diverse South and Appalachia.
Consider starting here, with these new July releases, but you can always find something great in our other monthly roundups.
Marysue Rucci Books: “A Cuban American family is sent into a tailspin when the ailing matriarch confesses the first of several shocking secrets to her daughter before undergoing heart surgery in this tender and twisty debut novel. Tell It to Me Singing is a story that takes readers from Miami to Cuba to the jungles of Costa Rica and, along the way, explores the question of how and to whom we belong, how a life is built, and how we know when we’re home.”
Harper: “In this stunning debut novel, four generations of complex Black women contend with motherhood and daughterhood, generational trauma, and the deeply ingrained tensions and wounds that divide them as they redefine happiness and healing for themselves. In masterful, elegant prose, debut novelist Sarai Johnson has created a rich and moving portrait of Black women’s lives today.”
FSG: “A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of storytelling, Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise is an interlocking and page-turning whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, she reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction.”
Abrams: “An epic novel about Civil War–era Nashville’s ‘public women,’ an age-old secret society, and the earth-shaking power of the female. Inspired by Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and the true story of Nashville’s attempt to exile its prostitutes during the American Civil War, Daughters of Chaos weaves together ‘found’ texts, fabulism, and queer themes to question familiar notions of history and family, warfare, and power.”
Curbstone Books: “In his fourth poetry collection, José Antonio Rodríguez investigates how one constructs a relationship to the self, to community, and to poetry itself. Ultimately this book lays bare an individual and, in doing so, shows how poetry acts as a place of succor and vulnerability for one’s very identity. Together these poems explore what it means to be queer, immigrant, and Chicano.”
Ballentine Books: “Inspired by C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, this wondrous novel is a fairy tale for grown-ups who still knock on the back of wardrobes — just in case. As boys, best friends Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell went missing in a vast West Virginia state forest, only to mysteriously reappear six months later with no explanation for where they’d gone or how they’d survived.”
Tin House: “A haunting, imaginative, and twisting tale of two sisters and the menacing, unexplained forces that threaten them and their rural mountain community. In turns both terrifying and otherworldly, author Alisa Alering opens the door to the hidden world of Smothermoss — a mountain that sighs, monsters made of ink, rabbits dead and alive, and ropes that won’t come undone. Unsettling, propulsive, and wonderfully atmospheric, Alering’s stunning debut novel renegotiates what is seen and unseen, what is real and what is haunted.”
Regal House: “When Birdie Barker Price finds an old ballot box on her front porch, she opens a Pandora’ s Box full of clues to Coweetsee County’ s corrupt elections, hidden crimes, and guilty passions. She enlists the help of her ex-husband, Roy Barker, currently campaigning for sheriff. Suspicions soon fall on Charlie Clyde Harmon, a felon who served time for a fatal arson at a Black church. He still insists he was framed by the disgraced former sheriff, but no one believes him. Filled with false charges, child brides, and murder ballads about the heartache of wronged women and the revenge they seek, Kings of Coweetsee introduces us to a people and place with a vanishing culture and an uncertain future.”
Random House: “An epic novel of star-crossed lovers set in a doomsday cult on the Texas prairie that asks: what would you sacrifice for the person you love? Based on the true events that unfolded thirty years ago during the siege of the Branch Davidian compound, Bret Anthony Johnston’s We Burn Daylight is an unforgettable love story, a heart-pounding literary page turner, and a profound exploration of faith, family, and what it means to truly be saved.”
Atria: “Three generations of fiercely strong and stubborn Mexican American women face grief head-on as they attempt to shed generational trauma and discover the true meaning of home in this lyrical novel that features magical realism in the tradition of The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina and The House of the Spirits.”
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