2013 Summer Okra Picks

Southern indie booksellers like their okra, and they love their southern books. The new list of Okra Picks --great southern books, fresh off the vine-- has just been released. A dozen new books that all have two things in common: They are southern in nature, and there is a southern indie bookseller that wants everyone to read each one! The SIBA Okra picks offer a curated reading list for every season.

A Place at the Table by Susan Rebecca White

As it sweeps from a freed-slave settlement in 1920's North Carolina to the Manhattan of the deadly AIDS epidemic of the 1980s to today's wealthy suburbs, White celebrates the healing power of food and the magic of New York as three seekers come together.

And Then I Found You by Patti Callahan Henry

Kate Vaughan is no stranger to tough choices. She's made them before. Now it's time to do it again. Kate has a secret, something tucked away in her past. Just when Kate thinks she can love, just when she believes she can conquer the fear, she's filled with dread.

The Astronaut Wives Club by Lily Koppel

As America's Mercury Seven astronauts are launched on death-defying missions, television cameras focus on the brave smiles of their young wives. Overnight, these military spouses are transformed into American royalty, and will rally together as tragedies begin to touch their lives.

The Girl from Felony Bay by J.E. Thompson

Debut author Thompson presents the story of a girl, a crime, and a great unsolved mystery set deep in the heart of South Carolina.

Heart of Palm by Laura Lee Smith

Utina, Florida, is a small, down-at-heels southern town. Utina hasn't seen economic growth in decades, and no family is more emblematic of the local reality than the Bravos, who are held together by love and tenuously brokered truces. Little do any of them know that Utina is about to become a land of opportunity.

In the Garden of Stone by Susan Tekulve

"This debut novel opens in 1924 with the derailment of a passing train that buries 16-year-old Emma Palmisano's house in coal. Caleb, the railroad man who rescues Emma, marries her a week later and gifts her with 47 acres of Virginia farmland. The novel tells the story of the successive generations of Emma and Caleb's family, who endure an d grow despite poverty and hardship."--Library Journal.

Looking for Me by Beth Hoffman

A Southern novel of family and antiques from the bestselling author of the beloved Saving CeeCee Honeycutt. Hoffman rekindles her flair for evocative Southern settings and the inimitable eccentrics in a compelling new novel.

Moonrise by Cassandra King

When Helen Honeycutt falls in love with a man who has recently lost his wife in a tragic accident, their sudden marriage creates a rift between her new husband and his circle of friends, who resent her intrusion into their circle. When the newlyweds join them for a summer at Moonrise, his late wife's family home in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, it soon becomes clear that someone is trying to drive her away, in this writer's homage to Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier.

The Time Between by Karen White

The "New York Times"-bestselling author delivers a novel of two generations of sisters and secrets set in the stunning South Carolina Lowcountry. Eleanor Murray seeks the truth about the past of two sisters' secrets that could help heal her troubled relationship with her own sister.

Whistling Past the Graveyard by Susan Crandall

Determined to get to Nashville to find her mother in 1963, nine-year-old spitfire Starla Claudelle runs away from her strict grandmother's Mississippi home, eventually accepting a ride from a Eula, a black woman traveling alone with a white baby.

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiScalfani

A lush, sexy, evocative debut novel of family secrets and girls'-school rituals, set in the 1930's South. For her mysterious role in a family tragedy, a strong-willed 15-year-old is cast out of her home and exiled to an equestrienne boarding school for Southern debutantes.

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Ann Fowler

 

When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is 17 years old and he is a young army lieutenant. Before long, the "ungettable" Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn't prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame.