Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P535
ISBN: 9780881465846
Price: $17.00
Imagine the relationship triangle from “East of Eden” and set it deep in the Appalachian Mountains. Add a couple of ghosts, a good measure of dysfunction, and a whole lot of twists and turns, and you have Ann Hite’s new Black Mountain novel, SLEEPING ABOVE CHAO. Hite’s fourth novel returns to Swannanoa Gap, a small town at the foot of Black Mountain, and introduces new characters while revisiting some favorites from her previous novels.
The reader will travel to a ranch in Montana, to Pearl Harbor, and to the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, while watching the cast of characters struggle through World War II, emerging into adulthoods which would weigh heavy on anyone’s shoulders. The story ends as the Civil Rights Movement ignites.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P539
ISBN: 9780881465952
Price: $16.00
In 1915 Grassy Glade, Florida, just across the bay from Panama City, Annie Laura’s birth daughter, Viola Lee has a good life.
But things begin to unravel when her fiancé, James, does not return from his lumber camp deep in the piney woods of North Florida. A stranger interrupts Viola Lee’s long-awaited and much hoped for reunion with Annie Laura, revealing a secret that could threaten Viola Lee’s happily ever after.
Milinda Jay has created a vivid cast of characters in this story of tragic family secrets, love, longing, redemption, and ultimate triumph.
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By author: Susie Gardner Illustrated by: Tina Mullen
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H924
ISBN: 9780881465907
Price: $16.00
Zoey has always been the star of the team. She believes she can win games all by herself. But when a new coach arrives, Zoey must learn that it takes more than one player to make a team.
This read-aloud book follows one young athlete as she learns how much better it is when all players work together. 1, 2, 3 TEAM! will have your listeners yelling “TEAM” in unison before the final page.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P540
ISBN: 9780881465969
Price: $16.00
In May of 1964, eleven-year-old Etta McDaniel’s horse is struck by lightning—dead and gone, she hopes— out of her life “as though he’d never come in the first place, bringing with him one catastrophe after another.” But Troy, gruesomely scarred, not only survives but seems to have gained supernatural powers, which Etta sets her mind on harnessing in her search for treasure. She is convinced that a find of the sort her hero Heinrich Schliemann unearthed at ancient Troy will set to rights everything suddenly gone wrong in her life: rivalry and betrayal at home and social unrest reaching even her family’s farm.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P541
ISBN: 9780881465976
Price: $18.00
Frannie Lewis has a lot of bad history with men, starting with the first one she ever met. She’s watched her aloof father disappear in the summers to work with a traveling carnival, seen her mother grow ever more suspicious and resentful. All her life, Frannie has kept their secrets and told their stories. Now thirty-six, she remains a pawn in their longstanding marital chess game—and at this point, it has devolved into a grudge match.
Even so, she longs to be a mother. Motherhood seems like a chance to reinvent what it means to be a family—to rectify her childhood, to start fresh. Still single, she isn’t sure if this will ever happen. When her father is diagnosed with cancer, she decides to have a baby on her own to encourage him to live and to please her mother, who still grieves over the baby she lost twenty-five years ago.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P548
ISBN: 9780881466232
Price: $17.00
Christian Bend isn’t the kind of place where one expects to find the sorts of secrets the widow Burdy Luttrell has been harboring. Tucked in the hills of East Tennessee, Christian Bend is a place of piercing beauty, where the rivers and love run constant. Burdy never could bring herself to tell Rain Hurd the truth about his father. She’d always meant to, but put it off until that day she was nearly killed in the shooting at Bean Station. As soon as he heard about the shooting, Rain left his job in Rhode Island and flew to Burdy’s bedside at that Knoxville hospital. That’s when Burdy told him about the letters.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P560
ISBN: 9780881466515
Price: $17.00
DIXIE LUCK features stories about hardy gamblers, look-on-the-bright-side salesmen, and other brands of optimistic Southerners. The stories are set in locales from Hot Springs, Arkansas, to the Atlantic Coast; each city or town seems to hold its own version of good fortune. The collection also includes the Faulkner Award-winning novella TERMINAL, a tale that finds a husband and wife reuniting in hopes of finding one final cash-out at the windows. The stories are literary--they study characters who try to stay honest and upbeat in the face of stacked odds.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P563
ISBN: 9780881466546
Price: $17.00
Easter weekend in Macon, Georgia: Connie Hotlzclaw is a good-hearted ex-boxer and small-time loser who can't keep out of trouble. He dreams of carrying his girlfriend, Rita Estes, a pretty Waffle House waitress, away to a ranch in Montana and a new start, away from the hamburger grease and petty hoods. His brother, Carl, though, has other ideas. He wants a big score, and he convinces pliable Connie to join in a kidnapping--an easy mark, a sure thing, a rich local college kid whose mother, of course, will do anything to get him back. All goes well, the boy's mother waits in a nearby hotel with the ransom money, and for a moment it seems Connie may get his dream of Rita and a Montana ranch.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H953
ISBN: 9780881466669
Price: $27.00
SET LIST begins in 1970, when Blanchard Shankles and John Covey come together and start making music in a rock and roll band named Skyye. They were two young men from Sequoyah, Georgia, with limited prospects and big dreams, who were joined in their quest for fame and fortune by their friends Ford Man Cooper, Chicken Raines, Jimbo Tant, Tucker McFry, and Simpson Taggart. These fledgling musicians set out upon a musical voyage that spanned four decades, fifty states, and uncounted miles as they pursued the elusive success that was always just one song ahead of them.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H963
ISBN: 9780881466690
Price: $25.00
In the summer of 1864, the ongoing war against the Union leaves the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia jittery and dispirited. When Amanda, a lonely, young mother whose husband is away fighting for the Confederacy, meets a convalescing soldier, she welcomes the diversion. Her enchantment soon turns to panic when she discovers she is pregnant. Hiding the shameful secret from her husband and her neighbors consumes her.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P581
ISBN: 9780881467024
Price: $17.00
THROUGH THE NEEDLE'S EYE is told through the authentic voice of Jessie, a precocious girl raised in the Blue Ridge Foothills of Southern Appalachia after World War II. Saddled with an alcoholic narcissistic father and a passive mother, Jessie is charged with mothering her siblings as generational curses and poverty never cease to overwhelm her family. As providence would have it, Granny Isabelle sets her eagle eye upon Jessie, the child neither parents nor teachers think worthwhile.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P587
ISBN: 9780881467130
Price: $18.00
John Wesley O'Toole, a disbarred former attorney, is trying to make a new start in life as an art dealer in Savannah, Georgia, after his release from prison. He is struggling financially when he is approached by a prominent wealthy businessman and offered a significant sum to help recover a painting that’s been stolen by the man's estranged granddaughter, Lucy. It’s an offer O'Toole can’t afford to refuse, and seemingly his one chance to avoid losing everything he’s worked for. With the help of Jenna, O'Toole’s friend and sometimes lover, he sets out to find the missing painting, and with it, the missing granddaughter.
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