"It is important to know how one's story begins, especially in our family," explains Sarah Macmillan to her daughter in "Geographies of the Heart," the first novel by Knoxville writer Caitlin Hamilton Summie.
In Katherine Paterson's new middle-grade novel, "Birdie's Bargain," 10-year-old Elizabeth "Birdie" Cunningham is sure that her dad's third tour of duty overseas with the National Guard will end with his death.
"Autism is just as much a part of my son as his blue eyes and long fingers," writes Nashville recording artist Allison Moorer in her second memoir, "I Dream He Talks to Me." "Autism is here with us, here in him, and it isn't going anywhere."
Nashville writer Ann Patchett's second volume of essays, "These Precious Days," is a grab bag of personable pieces drawn from Patchett's life, infused with a perspective that somehow manages to be both down-to-earth and utterly singular.
"THE LIST OF UNSPEAKABLE FEARS" by J. Kasper Kramer (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 288 pages, $18).
"I once suggested half-seriously that if the South needs a new flag - as it surely does - we could do worse than to use a dancing pig with a knife and fork," writes cultural commentator John Shelton Reed in his new book, "On Barbecue."
"The past is never dead. It's not even past," said William Faulkner. It's a sentiment that fairly shouts from the pages of Michael Amos Cody's "A Twilight Reel."
"Strange the crevasses racial superiority sinks into - hiding until perhaps years later it is flushed out," writes retired Episcopal priest Francis X. Walter in his memoir of the civil-rights movement in Alabama, "From Preaching to Meddling."
In "Ground Zero," possibly his most heart-wrenching middle-grade book yet, Knoxville native Alan Gratz takes the shock, disorientation, terror, blood, panic and pain of 9/11 and turns it all into a story whose relentless pace and nonstop suspense ensure readers feel every bit of it.
The war is over, but deep and debilitating scars remain in Nashville writer Jennie Fields' novel "Atomic Love," set in 1950s Chicago.
