Staff Picks
The Southern Book Prize 2024
- Sarah C.
- Friday, March 01
Collection
Each February, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance awards the Southern Book Prize to the best Southern books of the year. Titles are nominated by indie booksellers and voted on by their customers. This year's winners are:
Fiction - Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
Nonfiction - The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl
Children's & YA - When Sea Becomes Sky by Gillian McDunn
Check out all the finalists below!
Blood Debts
Published in 2023
Sixteen-year-old twins Clement and Cristina feel lost after their father's death, but find a new sense of purpose as they work to quell the rising tensions between New Orleans's magic and non-magic communities and find out who cursed their mother.
All the Sinners Bleed
Published in 2023
"After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus Crown returns home to Charon County, land of moonshine and cornbread, fist fights and honeysuckle. Seeing his hometown struggling with a bigoted police force inspires him to run for sheriff. He wins, and becomes the first Black sheriff in the history of the county. Then a year to the day after his election, a young Black man is fatally shot by Titus's deputies. Titus pledges to follow the truth wherever it leads. But no one expected he would unearth a serialkiller who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon. Now, Titus must pull off the impossible: stay true to his instincts, prevent outright panic, and investigate a shocking crime in a small town where everyone knows everyone yet secrets flourish. All while also breaking up backroads bar fights and being forced to protect racist Confederate pride marchers. For a Black man wearing a police uniform in the American South, that's no easy feat. But Charon is Titus's home and his heart, and he won't let the darkness overtake it. Even as it threatens to consume him."-- Provided by publisher.
Okra Stew
A Gullah Geechee Family Celebration
Published in 2023
Papa has something special planned for tonight's family dinner--and Bobo can't wait! Excited to learn how to make okra stew like his ancestors, Bobo helps Papa pick veggies from the garden, catch shrimp from the creek, rain down rice in the pot, simmer the stew, and even make a tasty side of cornbread. When the stew begins to bubble and pop, Bobo and his family gather around for a mouthwatering feast.
Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge
Intimate Confessions from a Happy Marriage
Published in 2023
"Welcome to the Coral Lounge, a room in Helen Ellis's New York City apartment painted such an exuberant shade of Sherman Williams that a peeping Tom once left a sticky note with the doorman asking for the color. It is in the Coral Lounge that the magic of Helen's marriage unfolds: Shindigs where strangers swap clothing in the powder room, a party game called "What's in the box?" makes its uproarious debut, the Puzzle Posse pounces on a 500-piece jigsaw of a beheaded priest. Then, when the pandemic shuts down the city, the Coral Lounge becomes a place of refuge, where Helen and her husband eat take-out while sitting on the floor like toddlers, dragging French fries through a ketchup swamp, where they sing to the two enormous cats who chew on Helen's hair while she sleeps, and where they while away the hours with Mexican Viagra and the ensuing neck injury. In these surprising, romantic, sexy, and hilariously frank essays Helen Ellis paints a portrait of true romance for our times"-- Provided by publisher.
The Vaster Wilds
Published in 2023
Escaping from a colonial settlement in the wilderness, a servant girl, with nothing but her wits, a few possessions and some faith, is tested beyond the limits of her imagination, forcing her to question her belief of everything her own civilization taught her.
Starling House
Published in 2023
"Eden, Kentucky, is just another dying, bad-luck town, known only for the legend of E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth-century author and illustrator who wrote The Underland--and disappeared. Before she vanished, Starling House appeared. But everyone agrees that it's best to let the uncanny house--and its last lonely heir, Arthur Starling--go to rot. Opal knows better than to mess with haunted houses or brooding men, but an unexpected job offer might be a chance to get her brother out of Eden. Too quickly, though, Starling House starts to feel dangerously like something she's never had: a home. As sinister forces converge on Starling House, Opal and Arthur are going to have to make a dire choice: to dig up the buried secrets of the past and confront their own fears, or let Eden be taken over by literal nightmares. If Opal wants a home, she'll have to fight for it."-- Provided by publisher.
How to Sell a Haunted House
Published in 2023
"New York Times bestselling author Grady Hendrix takes on the haunted house in a hilarious and terrifying new novel that explores the way your past--and your family--can haunt you like nothing else... Louise's parents have passed away, and she's returning to the small Southern town where she grew up to get their house ready to sell. It means she'll have to spend time with her younger brother--and their old grudges make that a terrifying prospect. But childhood hurts pale in comparison to the dangers posed by what still lives inside the house"-- Provided by publisher.
Begin Again
Published in 2023
College freshman Andie is used to fixing other people's problems, but when her seemingly perfect plan for her future starts to crumble, Andie struggles to fix them and learns that the best-laid plans are not necessarily the right one.
Where Are the Aliens?
The Search for Life Beyond Earth
Published in 2023
"A deep-dive exploration into the many theories and discoveries surrounding the possibility of extraterrestrial life beyond Earth"-- Provided by publisher.
When Sea Becomes Sky
Published in 2023
As Pelican Island's history-making drought wears on, the water level on Bex and Davey's beloved marsh reveals the hand of a statue that has been underneath the water for who knows how long, and the siblings are determined to find out more.
Tom Lake
A Novel
Published in 2023
Recalling the past at her daughters' request, Lara tells the story of a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance, which causes her daughters to examine their own lives and reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
We Are Too Many
A Memoir [Kind Of]
Published in 2023
"In this wryly humorous and innovative look at a marriage gone wrong, Hannah Pittard recalls a decade's worth of unforgettable conversations, beginning with the one in which she discovers her husband has been having sex with her charismatic best friend, Trish. These time-jumping exchanges are fast-paced, intimate, and often jaw-dropping in their willingness to reveal the vulnerabilities inherent in any friendship or marriage. Blending fact and fiction, sometimes re-creating exchanges with extreme accuracy and sometimes diving headlong into pure speculation, Pittard takes stock not only of her own past and future but also of the larger, more universal experiences they connect with--from the depths of female rage to the heartbreaking ways we inevitably outgrow certain people. Clever and bold and radically honest to an unthinkable degree, We Are Too Many examines the ugly, unfiltered parts of the female experience, as well as the many (happier) possibilities in starting any life over after a major personal catastrophe."--Publisher marketing.
The Comfort of Crows
A Backyard Year
Published in 2023
"In The Comfort of Crows, Margaret Renkl presents a literary devotional: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. As we move through the seasons -- from a crow spied on New Year's Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year, to the lingering bluebirds of December, revisiting the nest box they used in spring -- what develops is a portrait of joy and grief: joy in the ongoing pleasures of the natural world, and grief over winters that end too soon and songbirds that grow fewer and fewer. Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life. Grown children, unexpectedly home during the pandemic, prepare to depart once more. Birdsong and night-blooming flowers evoke generations past. The city and the country where Renkl raised her family transform a little more with each passing day. And the natural world, now in visible flux, requires every ounce of hope and commitment from the author--and from us. For, as Renkl writes, 'radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world.' With fifty-two original color artworks by the author's brother, Billy Renkl, The Comfort of Crows is a lovely and deeply moving book from a cherished observer of the natural world." -- Publisher's description.
Above Ground
Poems
Published in 2023
Clint Smith's vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are poems that meditate on what it means to raise a family in a world filled with constant social and political tumult. Above Ground wrestles with how we hold wonder and despair in the same hands, how we carry intimate moments of joy and a collective sense of mourning in the same body. Smith's lyrical, narrative poems bring the reader on a journey not only through the early years of his children's lives, but through the changing world in which they are growing up--through the changing world of which we are all a part.
Chaos Theory
Published in 2023
"Since Shelbi enrolled at Windward Academy as a senior and won't be there very long, she hasn't bothered making friends. What her classmates don't know about her can't be used to hurt her--you know, like it did at her last school. Andy Criddle is not okay. At all. He's had far too much to drink. Again. Which is bad. And things are about to get worse. When Shelbi sees Andy at his lowest, she can relate. So she doesn't resist reaching out. And there's no doubt their connection has them both seeing stars ... but the closer they get, the more the past threatens to pull their universes apart. #1 New York Times bestselling author Nic Stone delivers a tour de force about living with grief, prioritizing mental health, and finding love amid the chaos."--Provided by publisher
This Isn't Going to End Well
The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew
Published in 2023
"The author tries to come to terms with the life and death of his multitalented longtime friend and brother-in-law, who had been his biggest hero and inspiration"-- Provided by publisher.
Let Us Descend
A Novel
Published in 2023
In the years before the Civil War, Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, struggles through the miles-long march, seeks comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother, opening herself to a world beyond this world.