Speak for England

Brian Marley, winner of Britain’s ultimate reality TV show, survives a helicopter crash only to find himself in the midst of a jungle-island village founded by survivors of another plane crash—one that took place in 1958. With rescue imminent, Brian discovers that the seemingly idyllic community—modeled after pre-Sixties England and overseen by a stern Headmaster—is founded on a far more sinister premise. Satirical and insightful, Speak for England is a story of the clash between English cultures separated by fifty years of history. The Observer called James Hawes 'the funniest British novelist writing today'. Speak for England proves it, over and over again.

Literature & Fiction

Hawes, James M

Humor & Satire

Lawson Library

Laugh-out-loud funny and dripping with style, this debut collection of stories holds a fun house mirror to the everyday lives of characters as empathetic as they are absurd. From the self-appointed historian of the title piece to the wage slaves of "Our Spring Catalog" and "The Pipe," these are characters you’ve met before. They’re quirky visionaries and misguided dreamers sprung from a world of high school ambitions and misunderstood intentions. Laugh-out-loud funny, absurd, and always human, Jack Pendarvis’s debut collection is the work of a writer of rare comedic literary talent.

The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure

Pendarvis, Jack

Contemporary

Winner of the Prix Goncourt, Laurent Gaudé’s The House of Scorta follows five generations of the infamous Scorta family as they struggle to survive in a small southern Italian village. While their scandalous history confronts them at every turn, they are blessed with an imposing pride and a relentless faith in their own power. The lyrical narrative is punctuated by the confessions of the elderly Carmela, revealing her family’s past of notorious crimes, forsaken loves, and long-buried secrets.

The House of Scorta

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Gaude, Laurent/ Sartarelli, Stephen (TRN)/ Hawkes, Sophie (TRN)

Mystery

The third volume of Stories from the Blue Moon Café presents a selection of the most talented practitioners of Southern writing, including Rick Bragg, Tim Gautreaux, William Gay, and Daniel Wallace.

Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe III

Bailed out of jail and holed up in a low-rent motel, amnesiac Eric Ashworth’s only memory is a woman’s name: Desiree. With steadily increasing doses of a strange new hallucinogen, Eric finds that the drug allows him to reassemble his past in broken fragments. But as he begins to lose touch with the present, his distinction between truth and fantasy begins to crumble, creating a world where divisions between love and loss, violence and tenderness, and fact and fiction are less discernible than they ought to be.

Dermaphoria

Clevenger, Craig

United States

After twenty years of marriage, Marry Jude has had enough of Benjamin. "A thousand Benjamins couldn’t make me happy," she says. Lost in the numbness of habit and the undertow of memories, Benjamin meets Kim, a woman eighteen years his junior who bears a sadness in her green eyes that is connected to a scar that runs from the base of her throat to her ribs. Slowly, these two people, who for entirely different reasons believe themselves beyond repair, begin to admit that this might actually be the time of their lives.

A Thousand Benjamins

Kun, Michael

Stretching across two decades and unfolding in Olympic-year intervals, Origin of Haloes tells the story of two families – the LeBlancs and the Halliwells – connected by an illicit affair and a lie that has dire consequences. A tale of love, betrayal, and lingering ghosts, Origin of Haloes explores the shattering ways a family can break apart even as it stays together.

Origin of Haloes

Den Hartog, Kristen

Genre Fiction

Black Tide

Jack Irish is recovering from his last foray into the criminal underworld when he agrees to look for the missing son of Des Connors, the last living link to Jack’s father. It’s an offer he soon regrets, as he discovers that prodigal sons often go missing for a reason, and they always have something to hide. The second book in Peter Temple’s Jack Irish series, Black Tide takes us back into a brilliantly evoked world of pubs, racetracks, and sports – not to mention intrigue, corruption, and violence.

Temple, Peter

Literary

A troubled woman, bent on revenge, implicates her husband, his family, and a Southern community in an unsolvable murder. With its swift prose and shrewd insight, The Point of Fracture is both a gripping page-turner about a perfect crime and a poignant portrait of the human psyche.

The Point of Fracture

Hollon, Frank Turner

When Phineas Poe is enlisted by his old ally, Detective Moon, to find a missing cop named Jimmy Sky, he is drawn into the Game of Tongues, a violent fantasy game played by the disaffected and delusional in the punk clubs, rooftops, and sewers of Denver. With everyone he meets possessing multiple personalities and his own identity slipping away, Poe realizes if he can hang on to his sanity long enough to find Jimmy Sky, he might just beat the game.

Penny Dreadful

Will Christopher Baer

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