Briar Patch Books

Tag: North Carolina fiction

  • The dancing woman speaks to us all

    Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson DANCING WOMAN. By Elaine Neill Orr. Blair/Carolina Wren Press. 291 pages. $28.95, hardcover. Elaine Neill Orr is a gifted writer whose works are inspired and enriched by her creative temperament and her unusual perspective on the world. In her third novel, Dancing Woman, she is perhaps at the height of…

  • Like fine wine, a good novel grows better with age

    Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson. RUIN CREEK. By David Payne. Cedar Lane Books, an imprint of Ingram. 367 pages. $18, paperback. If you’re looking for a beautifully written, moving, wise novel to read while you’re lounging on the beach under a shady tent or umbrella, you couldn’t do better than Ruin Creek, the second of…

  • Murder at the salvage yard

    Here’s a remarkably good first novel by the latest addition to my list of outstanding North Carolina authors. Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson IT DIES WITH YOU.  By Scott Blackburn. Crooked Lane Books. 304 pages. $27.99. When Hudson Miller was just a boy, his dad “dismantled” what had been a reasonably happy, church-going, middle class…

  • A gem of a Southern novel

    Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson SOUTH OF HEAVEN. By Patti Frye Meredith. Mint Hill Books, Main Street Rag Publishing Company. $17.95, paperback. Patti Frye Meredith’s South of Heaven is a gem of a Southern novel, one of those rare books that captures life in the South with all its contradictions and nuances without turning characters…

  • Tarheel troubadour

    Bob Moyer has returned from his latest adventures to give us another fine book review.   Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer IN THE VALLEY. By Ron Rash. Doubleday. 220 pages. $26.95   There’s gold in them thar mountains. North Carolina mountains, that is, and Ron Rash knows how to mine it. Critics frequently call him an…

  • She’s back, in great style

    Readers who have access to the Greensboro News & Record’s lively book page will find my interview with North Carolina native Jill McCorkle there today, along with my review of her wonderful new novel, Life After Life, just being published by Shannon Ravenel Books (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill). Her fans will recall that McCorkle made…

  • Y’all come back now, hear?

    Once again, Bob Moyer and I have read the same book. I reviewed Margaret Maron’s latest for the Greensboro News & Record, and Bob is reviewing it for Briar Patch Books. I may have treated Maron’s book a tad more gently than Bob did, but we are in agreement that the new one is not…

  • Dangerous mountain

    Remember Charles Frazier, the North Carolina writer who made a huge splash with his first novel, Cold Mountain, in 1997? Then word got out that he received a staggeringly large advance for his second novel, Thirteen Moons, nine years later. As a result, there was more media attention to the business of publishing his books…