It's 1894. Jordan Wallace and Sadie Wagner appear to have little in common. Jordan, a middle-aged black teacher, lives in segregated Chicago. Two thousand miles away, Sadie, the white wife of an ambitious German businessman, lives in more tolerant Oakland, California. But years ago, their families intertwined on a plantation in Virginia. There, Jordan's and Sadie's mothers developed a bond stronger than blood, despite the fact that one was enslaved...

Cotton County, Georgia, 1930. Two babies-- one light-skinned, the other dark-- are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. Elma begins to raise her babies as best as she can, under the roof of her mercurial father, Juke, and with the help of Nan, the young black housekeeper. But the ties that...

After losing his twin to a drowning accident and his wife to divorce, Zeke Cooper leaves his mother and two daughters behind in Tennessee and travels to Virginia horse country, where he considers his responsibility to repair his fractured family.

When Beth McKenzie returns to her hometown to turn an old Southern mansion into a B&B called The Dixie Dew, her first guest is murdered. Three days later a young priest is found strangled in his chapel. The town of Littleboro is turned upside down and the cop, whose job is mainly controlling football traffic on Friday nights, is not up to the challenge. Fearing that her new B&B is in danger of failing, Beth sets out to discover the truth.

She was a blond goddess, a box office megastar. Every woman wanted to be her; every man wanted to bed her. But over a year ago Devon Stafford vanished without a trace. As a biographer, Jake Gannon had taught himself to follow the clues of a person's life story like a detective. As an ex-Marine, he was accustomed to being firmly in control. But when his car died in a little town called Mare's Nest on the Carolina coast, he had to admit he'd come

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The author returns to the Southern landscape of his previous novels to tell a story of a woman's search for the meaning of a dream that has haunted her throughout her life. Ever since Ellen can remember, she has dreamed of her mother slowly drowning. Now, with her own children all grown and her siblings long gone, she journeys back to her childhood for answers. Piecing together her memories, she finally articulates a story so shattering, it had long...

Grief-stricken and with his world collapsing around him, Penn Cage is shut out of trial preparations by his once-revered Southern doctor father, who is about to be tried for murder in the wake of revelations about a mixed-race child and KKK associations.

"In a small unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives to a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless, racially ambiguous, and refuses to speak. One family takes the strange visitor in and nicknames them Pew. As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting...

After the Civil War Paul, the son of a white father and a black mother finds himself caught between the two worlds of colored folks and white folks as he pursues his dream of owning land of his own.

"For readers of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and Redeployment, a searing debut exploring the lives of veterans returning to their homes in the South. Lacerating and lyrical, We Come to Our Senses centers on men and women affected by combat directly and tangentially, and the peculiar legacies of war. The story "Evie M." is about a vet turned office clerk whose petty neuroses derail even her suicide; in "We Come to Our Senses," a hip young couple...