There’s truly something for everyone in the collection of fantastic titles coming out this month: Natasha Trethewey’s moving memoir; the history of a minor incident that led to massive changes to America’s criminal justice system in Deep Delta Justice; the young adult supernatural mystery In the Woods; Richard Cox’s technological apocalypse; a deep dive into the history of Hurricane Katrina from Andy Horowitz; and a traditional summer family vacation gone wrong in Lake Life. You’re sure to find something you like in this list of the best new Southern books of July 2020!
A Parchment of Leaves
By Silas House
July 7, 2020
Blair: “In this nationally best-selling novel, A Parchment of Leaves, Silas House produced an iconic story of 1900s rural mountain Kentucky that remains a favorite of his many fans. On his way to find work in the Redbud Camp, Saul Sullivan encounters a Cherokee girl who is said to possess a beauty that brings death to the men who see her. Saul, however, is irrevocably drawn to Vine the moment he lays eye on her and believes they are meant to be married, over the objections of her mother and his.”
Clay’s Quilt
By Silas House
July 7, 2020
Blair: “In his New York Times best-selling novel Silas House introduced himself as an important voice for Appalachia and, indeed, for the entire rural South. In Clay’s Quilt, now a touchstone for his many fans, House takes us to Free Creek, KY, where a motherless young man forges his path to adulthood surrounded by ancient mountains and his blood relatives and adopted kin: his Aunt Easter tied to her faith and foreboding nature; his Uncle Paul, the quilter; the wild girls Evangeline and Alma; and a fiddler whose music calls to Clay’s heart. As he struggles to stitch up the void created by his mother’s death, Clay pieces together his own life’s quilt, all masterfully wrought by House.”
The Coal Tattoo
By Silas House
July 7, 2020
Blair: “The Coal Tattoo takes place in World War II-era rural Kentucky, where twenty-two-year-old Easter and Anneth, her teenaged sister, lose their parents young and now must raise each other. Easter finds her life in the Pentecostal Holiness church and its music, while Anneth dances and drinks in less-than-holy honky-tonks. Will the differences in their young lives and in their very natures tear them apart, or will the bond of the sisters prevail? In lucid prose with an ear for the voice of the sisters’ time and place, Silas House brings readers a rich and moving story of coal country.”
True Love
By Sarah Gerard
July 7, 2020
Harper Collins: “Nina is a struggling writer, a college drop-out, a liar, and a cheater. More than anything she wants love. She deserves it. From the burned-out suburbs of Florida to the anonymous squalor of New York City, she eats through an incestuous cast of characters in search of it: her mother, a narcissistic lesbian living in a nudist polycule; Odessa, a single mom with even worse taste in men than Nina; Seth, an artist whose latest show is comprised of three Tupperware containers full of trash; Brian, whose roller-coaster affair with Nina is the most stable “relationship” in his life; and Aaron, an aspiring filmmaker living at home with his parents, with whom Nina begins to write her magnum opus.”
Lake Life
By David James Poissant
July 7, 2020
Simon & Schuster: “The Starling family is scattered across the country. For years they’ve traveled to North Carolina to share a summer vacation at the family lake house. That tradition is coming to an end, as Richard and Lisa have decided to sell the treasured summer home and retire to Florida. Before they do, the family will spend one last weekend at the lake. But what should to be a joyous farewell takes a nightmarish turn when the family witnesses a tragedy that triggers a series of dramatic revelations among the Starlings — alcoholism, infidelity, pregnancy, and a secret the parents have kept from their sons for over thirty years. As the weekend unfolds, relationships fray, bonds are tested, and the Starlings are forced to reckon with who they are and what they want from this life.”
Last One Out Shut Off the Lights
By Stephanie Soileau
July 7, 2020
Little, Brown and Company: “Last One Out Shut Off the Lights is an evocative portrait of the last-chance towns of southwest Louisiana, where oil development, industrial pollution, dying wetlands, and the ever-present threat of devastating hurricanes have eroded their inhabitants’ sense of home. These eleven piercing stories feature indelible characters struggling to find a foothold in a world that is forever washing out from under them, people who must reckon with their ambivalence about belonging to a place so continually in flux.”
Katrina:
A History, 1915-2015
By Andy Horowitz
July 7, 2020
Harvard University Press: “The definitive history of Katrina: an epic of citymaking, revealing how engineers and oil executives, politicians and musicians, and neighbors black and white built New Orleans, then watched it sink under the weight of their competing ambitions. Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the disaster extend across the twentieth century.”
The Bright Lands
By John Fram
July 7, 2020
Hanover Square Press: “The town of Bentley holds two things dear: its football, and its secrets. But when star quarterback Dylan Whitley goes missing, an unremitting fear grips this remote corner of Texas. Shocking, twisty and relentlessly suspenseful, John Fram’s debut is a heart-pounding story about old secrets, modern anxieties and the price young men pay for glory.”
A Peculiar Peril
By Jeff VanderMeer
July 7, 2020
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: “Jonathan Lambshead stands to inherit his deceased grandfather’s overstuffed mansion — a veritable cabinet of curiosities — once he and two schoolmates catalog its contents. But the three soon discover that the house is filled with far more than just oddities: It holds clues linking to an alt-Earth called Aurora, where the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley has stormed back to life on a magic-fueled rampage across a surreal, through-the-looking-glass version of Europe replete with talking animals (and vegetables). Swept into encounters with allies more unpredictable than enemies, Jonathan pieces together his destiny as a member of a secret society devoted to keeping our world separate from Aurora. But as the ground shifts and allegiances change with every step, he and his friends sink ever deeper into a deadly pursuit of the profound evil that is also chasing after them.”
Blacktop Wasteland
By S. A. Cosby
July 14, 2020
Flatiron Books: “Beauregard ‘Bug’ Montage is an honest mechanic, a loving husband, and a hard-working dad. Bug knows there’s no future in the man he used to be: known from the hills of North Carolina to the beaches of Florida as the best wheelman on the East Coast. He thought he’d left all that behind him, but as his carefully built new life begins to crumble, he finds himself drawn inexorably back into a world of blood and bullets. Like Ocean’s Eleven meets Drive, with a Southern noir twist, S. A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland is a searing, operatic story of a man pushed to his limits by poverty, race, and his own former life of crime.”
The Lord’s Acre
By David Armand
July 15, 2020
Texas Review Press: “Set in the bucolic town of Angie, Louisiana, The Lord’s Acre tells the story of Eli Woodbine, a young boy who watches helplessly as his fundamentalist parents give in to their increasing sense of desperation and paranoia, living in a world where they can no longer see any hope or reason for existing. When the family is at their absolute lowest, they come across a local, charismatic church leader, in whom they quickly place all of their faith. Yet this man — known to them only as ‘Father’ — is unlike anyone they have ever encountered before. But one day, and with no explanation save for a mysterious gift given to Eli, Father disappears, leaving everything behind him in ruin.”
Some Go Home
By Odie Lindsey
July 21, 2020
W. W. Norton: “A searing debut novel that follows three generations — fractured by murder, seeking redemption — in fictional Pitchlynn, Mississippi. 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. Some Go Home twists together personal and collective history, binding north Mississippi to northside Chicago, in a richly textured, explosive depiction of both the American South and our larger cultural legacy.”
South of the Buttonwood Tree
By Heather Webber
July 21, 2020
Forge Books: “Blue Bishop has a knack for finding lost things. While growing up in charming small-town Buttonwood, Alabama, she’s happened across lost wallets, jewelry, pets, her wandering neighbor, and sometimes, trouble. No one is more surprised than Blue, however, when she comes across an abandoned newborn baby in the woods, just south of a very special buttonwood tree. Sarah Grace Landreneau Fulton is at a crossroads. She has always tried so hard to do the right thing, but her own mother would disown her if she ever learned half of Sarah Grace’s secrets. The unexpected discovery of the newborn baby girl will alter Blue’s and Sarah Grace’s lives forever. Both women must fight for what they truly want in life and for who they love. In doing so, they uncover long-held secrets that reveal exactly who they really are — and what they’re willing to sacrifice in the name of family.”
Pew
By Catherine Lacey
July 21, 2020
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: “In a small, unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives for a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless and racially ambiguous and refuses to speak. One family takes in the strange visitor 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 identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origin. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of who they really are — a devil or an angel or something else entirely — is dwarfed by even larger truths.”
House of the Rising Sun
By Richard Cox
July 27, 2020
Night Shade: “Both a frightening apocalyptic story set in the southern United States and a character-focused, deeply moving literary thriller. What would happen if technology all over the world suddenly stopped working? When a strange new star appears in the sky, human life instantly grinds to a halt. Across the world, anything and everything electronic stops working completely.”
Hieroglyphics
By Jill McCorkle
July 28, 2020
Algonquin Books: “A mesmerizing novel about the burden of secrets carried across generations. Lil and Frank married young, launched into courtship when they bonded over how they both — suddenly, tragically — lost a parent when they were children. Over time, their marriage grew and strengthened, with each still wishing for so much more understanding of the parents they’d lost prematurely. Hieroglyphics reveals the difficulty of ever really knowing the intentions and dreams and secrets of the people who raised you. In her deeply layered and masterful novel, Jill McCorkle deconstructs and reconstructs what it means to be a father or a mother, and what it means to be a child piecing together the world around us, a child learning to make sense of the hieroglyphics of history and memory.”
I Hold a Wolf by the Ears
By Laura van den Berg
July 28, 2020
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: “I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, Laura van den Berg’s first story collection since her prizewinning book The Isle of Youth, draws readers into a world of wholly original, sideways ghost stories that linger in the mouth and the mind. Both timeless and urgent, these eleven stories confront misogyny, violence, and the impossible economics of America with van den Berg’s trademark spiky humor and surreal eye. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears presents a collection of women on the verge, trying to grasp what’s left of life: grieving, divorced, and hyperaware, searching, vulnerable, and unhinged, they exist in a world that deviates from our own only when you look too closely. With remarkable control and transcendent talent, van den Berg dissolves, in the words of the narrator of ‘Slumberland,’ ‘that border between magic and annihilation,’ and further establishes herself as a defining fiction writer of our time.”
Deal with the Devil
By Kit Rocha
July 28, 2020
Tor Books: “Nina is an information broker with a mission — she and her team of mercenary librarians use their knowledge to save the hopeless in a crumbling America. Knox is the bitter, battle-weary captain of the Silver Devils. His squad of supersoldiers went AWOL to avoid slaughtering innocents, and now he’s fighting to survive. They’re on a deadly collision course, and the passion that flares between them only makes it more dangerous. They could burn down the world, destroying each other in the process…Or they could do the impossible: team up. This is the first book in a near-future science fiction series with elements of romance.”
Memorial Drive
By Natasha Trethewey
July 28, 2020
Ecco: “At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief as an entry point into understanding the tragic course of her mother’s life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother’s history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a ‘child of miscegenation’ in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985.”
Deep Delta Justice:
A Black Teen, His Lawyer, and their Groundbreaking Battle for Civil Rights in the South
By Matthew Van Meter
July 28, 2020
Little, Brown and Company: “In 1966 in a small town in Louisiana, a 19-year-old black man named Gary Duncan pulled his car off the road to stop a fight. Duncan was arrested a few minutes later for the crime of putting his hand on the arm of a white child. Rather than accepting his fate, Duncan found Richard Sobol, a brilliant, 29-year-old lawyer from New York who was the only white attorney at ‘the most radical law firm’ in New Orleans. Against them stood one of the most powerful white supremacists in the South, a man called simply ‘The Judge.’ In this powerful work of character-driven history, journalist Matthew Van Meter vividly brings alive how a seemingly minor incident brought massive, systemic change to the criminal justice system.”
In the Woods
By Carrie Jones and Steven E. Wedel
July 28, 2020
Tor Teen: “It should have been just another quiet night on the farm when Logan witnessed the attack, but it wasn’t. Something is in the woods. Something unexplainable. Something deadly. Hundreds of miles away, Chrystal’s plans for summer in Manhattan are abruptly upended when her dad reads tabloid coverage of some kind of grisly incident in Oklahoma. When they arrive to investigate, they find a witness: a surprisingly good-looking farm boy. As townsfolk start disappearing and the attacks get ever closer, Logan and Chrystal will have to find out the truth about whatever’s hiding in the woods…before they become targets themselves.”
Southern Review of Books 