My writing often focuses on motherhood and the difficult choices mothers are asked to make every day. I search for books to help me understand the points of view of other women. What they're thinking and feeling and the revelations that shape them and change the trajectory of their lives. I decided a long time ago, that if I'm going to invest the amount of time it takes to write a novel, then I have to have a passion for it. I strive to write characters that resonate, with those who are often marginalized in society because I want to shine a light on all the facets of humanity, not just the pretty ones.
This author is the queen of modern family storytelling. When a scandalous photo is snapped of an underage girl at a party Nina’s son attended and then shared publicly, it sets off a powder keg in her affluent community. It was interesting seeing the way money could corrupt a family and a mother who fought against that instinct to do what was right. Nina is divided between loyalty to her husband and son and standing up for a girl who was assaulted. When the truth comes out, it is a life-changing moment that changes everything.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this riveting novel from the #1 bestselling author of Something Borrowed and First Comes Love, three very different people must choose between their families and their most deeply held values. . . .
“An unpredictable page-turner that unfolds in the voices of three superbly distinct characters.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution • “A gripping, thought-provoking journey.”—Jodi Picoult
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THESKIMM
Nina Browning is living the good life after marrying into Nashville’s elite. More recently, her husband made a fortune selling his tech business, and their adored son has been…
I’m a professor of modern US and global history at Hartwick College in upstate New York. I have been reading and researching the history of conservative and right-wing movements in the United States and the wider world for almost two decades. My first book, Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War, was published by University of North Carolina Press in 2018. My articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in Jacobin, Diplomatic History, Terrorism and Political Science, H-War, and H-Diplo. I’m currently at work on two projects: a history of the transatlantic white power movement and a film documentary about the short-lived white supremacist nation of Rhodesia and its contemporary legacies.
The rise of the right was in many ways a southern phenomenon as the Old South transformed into the Sun Belt. White Flight explores how white supremacy and fears over desegregation propelled the conservative movement in Atlanta and on the national stage. As federal initiatives spelled the end for segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, southern whites managed to preserve racial discrimination through more subtle avenues. Whites fled Atlanta’s urban core for its suburbs where they reformed the world of white supremacy, giving birth to new causes such as tax revolts, tuition vouchers, and the privatization of public services.
During the civil rights era, Atlanta thought of itself as "The City Too Busy to Hate," a rare place in the South where the races lived and thrived together. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, however, so many whites fled the city for the suburbs that Atlanta earned a new nickname: "The City Too Busy Moving to Hate." In this reappraisal of racial politics in modern America, Kevin Kruse explains the causes and consequences of "white flight" in Atlanta and elsewhere. Seeking to understand segregationists on their own terms, White Flight moves past simple stereotypes to explore the…
I’m an award-winning and bestselling novelist known for writing in a wide variety of genres. My most popular work to date is Lovecraft Country, a supernatural horror novel that served as the basis for the acclaimed HBO series of the same name.
It’s not the scariest Stephen King novel I’ve ever read—I’d give that honor to The Shining—but this book remains my all-time favorite.
The story of John Smith, who awakens from a five-year coma with psychic powers that are more curse than blessing, plays to King’s greatest strength as a writer: the ability to create believable characters who you really care about.
The book is also a time capsule of American politics in the 1970s—one that seems newly relevant in the 2024 presidential season.
A #1 New York Times bestseller about a man who wakes up from a five-year coma able to see people’s futures and the terrible fate awaiting mankind—a “compulsive page-turner” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
Johnny Smith awakens from a five-year coma after his car accident and discovers that he can see people’s futures and pasts when he touches them. Many consider his talent a gift; Johnny feels cursed. His fiancée married another man during his coma and people clamor for him to solve their problems.
Wendy Hamand Venet is an emeritus professor of history at Georgia State University. She is the author or editor of three books about Atlanta, Sam Richards’s Civil War Diary: A Chronicle of the Atlanta Home Front (edited work); A Changing Wind: Commerce and Conflict in Civil War Atlanta; Gone but not Forgotten: Atlantans Commemorate the Civil War.
Founded as a rail center in the 1830s, Atlanta was dependent on commercial ties with the North which explains the city’s Unionism before the Civil War. In the pivotal election of 1860 where Lincoln carried the northern states and a “southern rights” candidate carried the deep South, Atlantans voted overwhelmingly for Unionist candidates John Bell and Stephen A. Douglas. Although their numbers diminished after secession, a small cadre of Unionists remained in the city during the war, including Cyrena Stone, whose secret (and fascinating) diary is both a major source for and an appendix in this book.
During the American Civil War, a small group of Unionists found themselves trapped in the largest Southern city between Richmond and New Orleans. Atlanta was a Confederate bastion. The military ruled, and it brooked little dissent. But, as this work demonstrates, the Confederate military hadn't reckoned on Cyrena Stone. A Vermont native, Cyrena moved to Atlanta with her husband, Amherst, in 1854. After war broke out Amherst escaped to the North, but Cyrena remained behind. Hiding her small Union flag in her sugar bowl, suppressing but not moderating her well-known pro-Northern views, she belonged to a secret circle of Unionists…
I love books that deal with justice and make you feel
strong emotions. This book did that and more.
The story included discrimination
against Chinese and Black Americans in the South in the early 1900s. The plot was
moving, riveting and the writing was impeccable.
I'd often stop and be amazed
at the wonderful way the author strung her words together. Stacey Lee is a
talented and unique writer. It was filled with love, hope, and surprises.
A Reese's Book Club YA Pick and New York Times Bestseller
From the critically acclaimed author of Luck of the Titanic, Under a Painted Sky, and Outrun the Moon comes a powerful novel about identity, betrayal, and the meaning of family.
By day, seventeen-year-old Jo Kuan works as a lady's maid for the cruel daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Atlanta. But by night, Jo moonlights as the pseudonymous author of a newspaper advice column for the genteel Southern lady, "Dear Miss Sweetie." When her column becomes wildly popular, she uses the power of the pen to address…
I started writing about golf years ago… I went from freelancing to working for Golfweek and pretty soon had a career! I thought I had a brilliant idea: a series of mysteries with a golf theme! Then I learned there were about 267 other golf mysteries already out there, starting with Dame Agatha’s Murder on the Links! Oops. I eventually wrote seven Hacker novels, finally getting my golf-writer-turned-sleuth through all four majors. I also published a historical novel set in Scotland (sorry, no golf) and just launched the new Swamp Yankee Mystery series, set in a small Rhode Island town remarkably similar to the one I live in!
J. Michael Veron is a trial lawyer and avid golfer who has written a trilogy of legal thrillers (he’s been called the John Grisham of golf) that all have a strong golf theme. The Greatest Player was the first, featuring a summer intern at an Atlanta law firm who finds an old file of correspondence between the legendary Bobby Jones (who was, when not winning most of the golf tournaments between 1920 and 1930, when he retired from tournament golf, an Atlanta attorney) and a fictional teen-aged golf prodigy named Beau Stedman.
There’s a murder mystery and a court case and a lot of golf from the Golden Age of the sport.
When Charley Hunter goes to work as a summer intern at a prestigious Atlanta law firm, he has no idea that his passion for golf will come into play on the job. Stumbling onto a yellowed file containing correspondence between Beau Stedman, an astonishingly talented teenage golfer, and the legendary Bobby Jones (once a partner at the firm), Hunter finds himself embroiled in a decades-old murder case–and searching for an invisible champion who won nearly all his matches with the masters.
As Hunter unravels the facts of Stedman’s case, his hunger for the truth is matched only by his deepening…
I’m a career financial and business journalist, only recently turned novelist. I’m obsessed with the way that history repeats itself in the financial markets and that we never seem to learn our lessons. Fear and greed have always driven the behavior of bankers, traders, and investors; and they still do today, only barely inhibited by our regulatory system. I want to help people understand how markets work, and I like combining fiction with fact to explain these systems and how they’re abused. With that in mind, I work during the day as a reporter at NPR and by night as a scribbler of historical fiction with a financial twist.
I love the way Wolfe brings one of the more arcane areas of the financial markets to life - namely bankruptcy workout - and skewers the greed and ambition of real estate investors in the 1990s.
I’m a huge admirer of Wolfe’s technique of writing a novel using journalistic interviews, and I’m struck by the way he nails the characters and actions when he describes how the bankruptcy process works. And all while keeping the reader absolutely hooked on the narrative.
I go back to Wolfe’s novels again and again, not just to be amused and entertained but to get a real insight into the dark heart and often absurd workings of the financial system.
A dissection of greed-obsessed America a decade after The Bonfire of the Vanities and on the cusp of the millennium, from the master chronicler of American culture Tom Wolfe
Charlie Croker, once a fabled college football star, is now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real estate entrepreneur-turned conglomerate king. His expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000 acre quail shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife and a half-empty downtown tower with a staggering load of debt. Wolfe shows us contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made…
I have always been a seeker, fascinated by all cultures, philosophies, and spiritual perspectives. Although the concept is often different—for some, it’s a place of refuge, feeling safe or sheltered from pursuit, danger, or trouble; for others, it’s a state of being, an inner peace, I’ve found that the search for sanctuary—safe-haven—elsewhere—has ancient roots and contemporary reverberations. My novel, Guesthouse for Ganesha, further heightened my interest in this subject, for my protagonist, Esther Grünspan, both deeply wounded and unsafe, was compelled to seek sanctuary. As a first-time novelist with an 18-year journey to publication, I fully immersed myself in this topic’s study and comprehension.
Veena Rao’s Purple Lotus is an inspiring story of one woman’s (Tara) search for and discovery of self-worth, self-determination, inner strength, and authenticity. I admired the author’s fine writing which powerfully captures the harsh realities of a young immigrant’s life in an abusive marriage in a new, foreign country, the pressures and expectations from her traditional family and community back in India, and, ultimately, Tara’s ability and courage to recognize that she is undeserving of such treatment. Concurrently, she realizes that her struggles are emblematic of broader, systemic issues, which Tara forthrightly and eloquently addresses head-on.
A 2021 Georgia Author of the Year Award Finalist
Award-Winning Finalist, Women's Fiction, 2021 International Book Awards
Award-Winning Finalist, Multicultural Fiction, 2021 International Book Awards
Featured in Travel + Leisure's "20 Most-anticipated Books for Fall"
"20 Classic and New Books About Feminism That Will Get You Thinking and Talking"
Parade
"A moving and polished novel that highlights Rao's literary promise."
Kirkus Reviews
"Rao's resonant novel is an ode to the value of personal dignity and the importance of being true to oneself that carries on long after the final chapter."
Newsweek magazine
I have lived in Gettysburg, PA, all of my life, so I’m drawn to historical fiction, especially the Civil War era. The 1860s is the perfect setting for the enemies-to-lovers trope, and I am lucky enough to be surrounded by history all of the time. In doing lots of research, I have found that enemies fell in love more often than you might think during the Civil War. I hope you enjoy this list of books that got me interested in reading and continue to keep my attention to this day.
This is a beloved book for many, but I love it so much because both of the characters are so unlikeable—yet you fall in love with them. I also love the conflict and the dueling, strong personalities of Scarlet and Rhett.
The plot is full of emotion and passion, and yet there are no sex scenes, which is another reason why I like it so much.
The one thing you’ll find in common about the books I recommend and the books I write is the attention to detail. As a retired police officer, I know that it was often the smallest of details that helped solve a crime. In my books, you’ll find an inordinate amount of information that was never known to the public, and I think that’s what truly holds a reader’s interest. Killing Women is the true story of serial killer Don Miller, and you’ll be abhorred at what he did to his victims. Are you ready for his release in 2031?
This book is absolutely fascinating to me. When I write, I strive to include painstakingly detailed accounts of the crimes that were never known to the general public, and this book goes into every minute detail regarding the 1913 murder of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan in Atlanta, Georgia. Mary’s body was discovered in the basement of Atlanta’s National Pencil Factory, and it culminated in the conviction and death sentence of Leo Frank. Frank’s death sentence was commuted, but he was ultimately kidnapped and lynched two months after the commutation. I considered this a powerful example of investigative journalism with largely unknown details. It’s a gripping account of a time period in this nation’s history that could best be forgotten.
On April 27, 1913, the bludgeoned body of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan was discovered in the basement of Atlanta’s National Pencil Factory. The girl’s murder would be the catalyst for an epic saga that to this day holds a singular place in America’s collective imagination—a saga that would climax in 1915 with the lynching of Leo Frank, the Cornell-educated Jew who was convicted of the murder. The case has been the subject of novels, plays, movies and even musicals, but only now, with the publication of And the Dead Shall Rise, do we have an account that does full justice to…
