by Kelly Pickerill
We’re so excited to welcome Wiley Cash back to Lemuria tomorrow, Thursday the 20th, at 11:00 a.m. His first book, A Land More Kind Than Home, was hailed by readers and booksellers alike, with its blend of dark, religious fanaticism balanced by the innocence of a young boy who would do anything to protect his older, disadvantaged brother.
His new novel, This Dark Road to Mercy, is just as riveting. The story is told through the eyes, once again, of a child. Easter and her sister Ruby have been in the foster care system since their mother died of a drug overdose. Now their father has come back looking for them, and Easter suspects his fatherly concern is masking darker motivations. Easter has had to grow up too fast; with all she has witnessed and because of her desire to protect her sister, she has learned that sometimes hard decisions must be made by her alone — that adults can’t always help her.
Brady is Easter and Ruby’s guardian, and when the girls go missing, he is determined to find them himself. What he doesn’t know as he sets out is just how much trouble their father, a former minor league baseball player, is in. He is being tracked by someone ruthless, someone who is driven by revenge for something that happened long ago and has been fueling his single-minded rage ever since. What the reader discovers as the novel progresses is that everyone has secrets, dark spots in their history that might drive them to behave desperately.
Set during the baseball season when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire competed to break Roger Maris’s home run record, This Dark Road to Mercy is a fantastic sophomore effort by one of our favorite Southern authors.
This is an excerpt from Wiley’s blog entry about his visit to Lemuria in 2012:
I drove across town to the famous Lemuria Books, where I met some incredibly kind and knowledgeable booksellers. I’d met the manager Kelly a few months ago at a convention in New Orleans, and she showed me the galley that I signed then; it said, “I hope I get to visit your store one day.” I resigned it and wrote, “I’m at your store right now.” I also met two fellow writers: Ellis, a short story writer who will soon be pursuing a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing, and Adie, a poet who will enter the low-residency MFA program at Seattle Pacific this fall. They’re proud of their store, and they should be; it has an entire room dedicated to fiction, one whole corner of which is dedicated to Southern fiction! Photographs of well-known authors who have visited the store adorn the walls. I gave a reading and signed books under the watchful eyes of Eudora Welty, John Grisham, Larry Brown, and Richard Ford. See a connection here? Mississippians love their home-grown writers almost as much as they love their barbeque.
We hope his second visit to Lemuria is as memorable as the first. Come out to the bookstore tomorrow morning at 11:00 to meet him!
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