On the Southern Literary Trail discussion

I have created this thread to give old and new authors in this group a place to announce upcoming novels and new publications of southern themed books, without feeling like they are "marketing" to a captive audience.

Congratulations in advance to anyone getting a book published.

I'm a long-time, often lapsed, participant in this group. I have recently had a novel published, Black & Tan Fantasy.

I've attached a Booklife (Publisher's Weekly) review. Booklife gave the novel its Editor's Pick designation, that it reserves for, in its words, "superlative" books "of truly outstanding quality." So, hurray for me!

Booklife Review
Luce, Randall

In the 1920s, Harry Wilbourne—a white man who rescues a Black woman, Geneva, and her children from a fire—does more than commit a heroic act. As Randall demonstrates, with pained clarity, Harry steps out of whiteness itself, launching himself into a racialized exile. In Chattanooga, among the very people he tried to save, Harry becomes a stranger—never quite accepted, never fully at home, his journey exposing the cost of crossing lines in an era when the rules of identity are rigid and unforgiving. From that wrenching setup, Luce fast-forwards to the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement, as a young Black activist named Aleck Sharpe, raised in the shadows of racial violence, joins the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—but bristles at the doctrine of nonviolence, with Mississippi’s white supremacy chafing against everything he’s seen and felt.

Harry's punishing journey from a man of respectability to a disoriented "drowned man" exposes the social consequences of crossing racial boundaries in a violently bicolored era, and Aleck's woundedness positions violence as a domineering force suffered by Black lives. “We ran like rabbits,” Aleck reflects, his shame not just about running, but about having to run at all. Luce writes with intensity and sensitivity, giving voice to the fear, shame, and unbelonging that so often dominate America's racial landscape. The narrative refuses to romanticize resistance or villainize betrayal; rather, it insists that the deepest conflict lies not between races but within the self.

Luce traverses the haunted terrain of the segregated American South with historical precision, interrogating the complex construction of racial identity and the binary ways—violence and nonviolence—people are driven to pursue justice. As the story progresses to show the enduring impact of racism and denial of identity, readers can expect a weighty read, one that carries a profound message: belonging in a white man's world is neither given nor pure—it is fought for, fractured, and reimagined.

Takeaway: Crucial historical novel of American race, identity, and the cost of belonging.

Comparable Titles: William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer, Denny S. Bryce’s In the Face of the Sun.

You can buy it on Amazon through the link above, or directly through the publisher's (GladEye Press) website.

If any people reading my new novel, or my previous two, have any questions for me, you can post them at the Ask the Author section of my author's profile.