Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H905
ISBN: 9780881465365
Price: $24.00
Begin with what seems the end of things—how Conall Weaver lifts a gun to his head. And now dive backward into the labyrinthine worlds of home, where Conall is the center, into the maze of love, where Conall seeks and strives with his soul-mate, and into the maze of imagination, with its population of weapon-wielding heroes and local-color Texans…and then on, into the maze of childhood, where time seems illusion and all the threads and stories start.
In Conall Weaver, the mundane world and the wonders of the imagination collide and shoot out sparks. Inspired by the life of pulp writer Robert E. Howard, MAZE OF BLOOD explores the roots of story and the compulsions and conflicts of the heart in a Southern landscape.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P512
ISBN: 9780881465372
Price: $17.00
Within the tightly knit Cherokee community in the Smoky Mountains, a secret society of Snake Dancers is led by a group of elders, four of whom guard an artifact of incredible power. Guardianship has been passed from father to son for over 300 years. Theses artifacts belonged to Kanegwa’ti, a medicine man who controlled the power of Uktena (an evil spirit) in order to protect the tribe. Even the four guardians cannot reveal what they guard. The tradition of secrecy was set up by Kanegwa’ti to prevent anyone from awakening Uktena and bringing destruction.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P513
ISBN: 9780881465389
Price: $17.00
WHERE THE SOULS GO is Ann Hite’s third novel set in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Readers who loved GHOST ON BLACK MOUNTAIN, Hite’s first novel, will find many of the characters familiar. This book follows three generations of the Pritchard family, not only telling the story of how Hobbs Pritchard became the villain of Black Mountain, but highlighting women’s struggles in Appalachia, beginning in the Depression Era and ending in the mid-sixties.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P514
ISBN: 9780881465396
Price: $15.00
Sequel to the award-winning MOTHER OF RAIN.
When it is a healing they need, the people at Christian Bend, Tennessee, turn to one woman—Burdy Luttrell.
Melungeon by birth, Burdy learned the therapeutic properties of roots from the women in her family. When Burdy discovers that Lincoln Memorial University is hosting a class on healing roots, she persuades her friend, Mayne, to drive her up. The two women make a fateful stop at Laidlow Pharmacy at Bean Station where an armed gunman executes three people and critically injures another.
Burdy—the woman able to cure others—is now fighting for her life at University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville.
Karen Spears Zacharias has crafted a mesmerizing novel of tragedy and transformation, a beautiful rendering of fact and fiction, and a tenderhearted narrative of survivors and the battles they face.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P517
ISBN: 9780881465464
Price: $18.00
Based on the writings of renowned British actress, Fanny Kemble, and her life in 19th-century England and the American South.
THE POISONED TABLE portrays a passionate rivalry between fictional actress Isabel Graves and real-life Shakespearian stage sensation Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble.
In this tale of ambition, romance, and betrayal, Graves harbors early resentment, convinced that Kemble’s family theatre connections assured Fanny’s selection for the lead role in Romeo and Juliet despite Isabel’s superior beauty and talent. The novel traces their unconnected adventures and acting careers in the Old and New Worlds, as well as their introduction to the horrors of American slavery and to romance with one of the wealthiest men in America, Pierce Butler, owner of Georgia cotton and rice plantations and master of more than 800 slaves.
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Product Code: P511
ISBN: 9780881465532
Price: $16.00
In spring 1962, a young black girl named Etta Hemsley is killed at a civil rights demonstration on a university campus in Atlanta. The next day, the home of Jovita Curry, a black woman in Overton, Georgia, is burned.
Both events are etched into the memory of Cole Bishop and eerily play out the predictions of a former classmate named Marie Fitzpatrick. Both Cole and Marie are high school seniors when they first meet in fall 1954. Cole, like his classmates, is a native-born Southerner influenced by the traditions of segregation as a way of life. Marie is a recent transplant from Washington, DC, a brilliant and assertive nonconformist with bold predictions about a new world that is about to be ushered in by the force of desegregation. Included in her prophecy is a warning for Cole that will cause him to leave the South to live and teach in Vermont. The odd friendship between the two of them continues after high school in a series of tender and revealing letters.
THE BOOK OF MARIE is the story of a generation—whites and blacks—who ignited the war of change. Yet, it is also as much about the power of place— the finding of home—as it is about the history of events.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P530
ISBN: 9780881465730
Price: $18.00
Margaret Norman lives in a family with secrets, not the least of which is her own. But what concerns Margaret more is that her family will not talk about her mother, “Weezie,” an artist who died shortly after Margaret was born. Her father, Jim Norman, a brooding attorney, is too obsessed with his own pain to share. Louisa, her older sister, is hostile toward Margaret and ignores her. Black housekeeper, Ida, who is helping to raise Margaret, does not think it her place to tell what others will not. And gentle great aunt, Maggie, did not know Margaret’s mother.
Set in the South during the 1930s and 1940s, CARDINAL HILL takes place in a world where blacks and whites, although separated by custom and law, often thrive in personal relationships; where half a world away, a war disrupts lives of those close to home; and where little girls suspect that kissing causes babies.
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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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