Chapter 16

Indie Darling, the new thriller by Nashville author Lauren Nossett, plumbs a dark side of Music City through a tale about the mysterious disappearance of popular singer-songwriter Sarah Faith-Owens. Protagonist Kelly Winter, the private detective investigating the case, makes for engaging company; she’s a keen observer with a commitment to helping women in danger. She also has colorful tastes, including a little red sports car and a penchant for Dolly Parton.

Robyn Hitchcock’s new memoir, Stranded in the Future, is a lot like the pop surrealist’s music — lyrical, jangly, more than a bit weird, and full of wonder. Photo: Emma Swift The book follows the Nashville-based British singer-songwriter’s first memoir, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left. That was the year Hitchcock turned 14. He was in a boarding school. He was lonely, confused, curious. Songs were his gods. You don’t have read 1967 first, but why not? It’s a breeze and a blast.

In Obstinate Daughters: The Rebels, Writers, and Renegade Women Who Ignited the American Revolution, author Denise Kiernan explores the roles of everyday women — and men — in the events leading up to and during the Revolutionary War. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan She surveys a wide range of perspectives, including the experiences of patriots fighting for independence, loyalists struggling to maintain British rule, and enslaved people seeking their own freedom.

Jay McInerney’s latest novel begins on a nostalgic note, a 35th anniversary party held at the Odeon in Manhattan, site of countless binges in his characters’ riotous pasts.

The period between 1958 and 1964 is usually marked as an interregnum in rock ‘n’ roll history. The careers of the original rockers — Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis — had peaked by 1958, when Presley went into the army and Lewis was enduring his fans’ dismay about his recent marriage to his 13-year-old cousin Myra Gale Brown.

The brutality of colonialism haunts Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel, Land. The National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Hamnet brings her extraordinary skill for rendering family grief to a sprawling story that crosses several landscapes and spans millennia.

Humanities Tennessee, in partnership with Vanderbilt University, today announced the initial lineup of authors who will headline the 38th Annual Southern Festival of Books, taking place October 17-18 at Bicentennial Mall, the Tennessee State Museum, and the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville.

In 2012, Kevin Powers published his landmark debut novel, The Yellow Birds. A stark, elegiac tale of American soldiers enduring the chaos of the Iraq War, the novel was the PEN/Faulkner Award winner, a National Book Award finalist, and a bestseller. Powers’ intense depiction of combat and camaraderie and his credibility as an Iraq War combat veteran certainly played some role in the popularity of The Yellow Birds.

Probably no two families have captured the public’s attention more than the Kennedys and the Windsors. Older Boomers remember where they were when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The next generation got up early to watch the fairy-tale wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. There was the public fascination with the sexiest man alive, John F. Kennedy Jr., and those who remembered the tiny boy saluting his father’s coffin rejoiced when he married Carolyn Bessette.

In the summers of my childhood, when riding up and down the driveway on my bike had gotten old, I’d tumble through the house in search of my father. Of our brood, he was the hardest to locate. Mom could usually be found in the closet doing paperwork or in the kitchen painting glassware for her cottage industry.