LITERARY WOMEN
Celebrating Women Authors Since 1982
Browse the selection of authors for the 2020 Festival
Casey Cep
Offering a deeply moving portrait of Harper Lee, one of the country’s most beloved writers, Furious Hours also tells the story of Reverend Willie Maxwell, a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members to collect the insurance money. Lee attempted to capture the shocking murders, courtroom drama, and racial politics of the Deep South yet ultimately abandoned the project. Casey Cep brings these two stories to life.
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Catherine Chung
The Tenth Muse is a sweeping tale about legacy, identity, and the beautiful ways the mind can make us free. This impressive second novel from Catherine Chung interweaves myths and legends, both intellectual and familial, that grip the reader from start to finish. It captures a moment in time when the world was different but eerily echoes present-day struggles of race, gender, and how we belong in the world.
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Delia Owens
Where The Crawdads Sing is at once an ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising courtroom drama. Through the eyes of a young girl abandoned by her family and left to virtually raise herself in the isolation of the North Carolina marshland, this debut novel by Delia Owens explores the stubborn wildness that resides in all of us and examines the deeply human instincts that bind us to other people.
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Whitney Scharer
The Age of Light tells the story of Vogue model turned renowned photographer Lee Miller, and her search to forge a new identity as an artist after a life spent as a muse. Lee’s journey takes her from the cabarets of bohemian Paris to the battlefields of war-torn Europe during WWII, from inventing radical new photography techniques to documenting the liberation of the concentration camps as one of the first female war correspondents.
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Madhuri Vijay
In her debut novel, The Far Field, Madhuri Vijay follows a young Indian woman on an odyssey for a lost figure from her childhood to seek resolution of uncertainties about her deceased mother. It is a journey that takes her from her privileged life in Southern India to a remote Himalayan village in the troubled region of Kashmir; and unwittingly, to the brink of a devastating political and personal reckoning.
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Karen Thompson Walker
An ordinary town is transformed by a mysterious illness that triggers perpetual sleep in this mesmerizing novel from bestselling author Karen Thomas Walker. Written in luminous prose, The Dreamers is a breathtaking and beautiful novel, startling and provocative, about the possibilities contained within a human life—in our waking days and, perhaps even more, in our dreams.
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Elaine Weiss
Nashville, August 1920. It is the last stand for the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote; Tennessee, the best hope for the final vote needed to ratify the amendment, becomes the battleground. In her book, The Woman’s Hour, Elaine Weiss tells the dramatic story of the vicious political battle waged that hot summer between the suffragists and their fierce opponents. Intrigue, bribery, betrayals and bigotry abound.
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