Two Atlanta authors make their literary debuts during these waning days of summer, and both have author events in town next month.
Credit: Hub City Press
Credit: Hub City Press
Austyn Wohlers’ first novel “Hothouse Bloom” (Hub City Press, $24) charts the evolution of an anxious young woman who seems too emotionally fragile for this world. An unsuccessful painter with few acquaintances, a lackluster romance and an emotionally distant family, she’s led a life that was “aimless by every visible yardstick.” That is, until she inherits an apple orchard from a grandfather she barely knew.
Entranced by the kind of blind idealism that’s reserved for the young, Anna detaches from her former life and moves to the farm where she plans to build a life of her own design. Her goal is to create an environment where she can be at one with nature. She wants to “understand and process the world without language, to see it through shape and light and color” — not by painting it, but by experiencing it without distraction.
In order to achieve that nirvana, Anna needs total solitude. The problem with that plan is all the people who infringe on her sacred space, including a pair of neighboring sheep farmers — who recognize how out of her depth she is — and a writer friend on a misguided mission to “save” Anna from her situation.
When she is working in the orchard alone, Anna is able to attain that spiritual, meditative state she craves. But sneakily, almost without the reader even noticing it, Anna begins to come into her own as it dawns on her the only way to survive on the farm is to turn a profit — despite the unwelcome whiff of worldliness that introduces to her increasingly less-than-perfect environment. As she’s forced to adapt to the realities of the farm, her idealism is slowly chipped away by pragmatism.
In language that manages to be both lyrical and precise, Wohlers’ “Hothouse Bloom” captures the painstaking journey of self-discovery and the vagaries of human nature with the subtlety of a plant slowly revealing its flower.
A Cappella presents Wohlers in conversation with artist and musician A.V. Tapia on Sept. 16 at Commune in Avondale Estates. For details go to acappellabooks.com.
Credit: Simon & Schuster
Credit: Simon & Schuster
Atlanta resident Laura Dickerman delivers a breezy, snarky rom-com set in the cutthroat corporate world of book publishing with her debut, “Hot Desk” (Simon & Schuster, $29).
Upon her post-pandemic return to the offices of Avenue Publishing, editor Rebecca Blume discovers there’s been a corporate reshuffling. The upshot is, she has to forfeit her private office and share a desk with Ben Heath, an editor for a different publisher whom she’s never met before.
Rebecca gets the desk Mondays and Tuesdays, Ben gets it Wednesdays and Thursdays. A symbol of their burgeoning relationship, a prickly cactus is the sole object they share as they playfully spar and flirt through Post-it notes.
But when literary lion Edward David Adams dies, the competition over who will inherit his considerable literary estate heats up, pitting Rebecca and Ben in a ruthless tug-of-war. An intriguing development arises when Rebecca discovers her mother, Jane, has a history with “the Lion.”
In an unexpected twist, this dual timeline novel flashes back to the early ’80s when Jane and her best friend Rose are up-and-comers in Manhattan’s glamorous literary scene of that era. One fateful day during a spring blizzard, the women have an encounter with the Lion that changes the trajectory of their lives forever.
A Cappella Books presents Dickerman in conversation with former radio and TV host Mara Davis on Sept. 5 at Manuel’s Tavern. For details go to acappellabooks.com.
Suzanne Van Atten is a book critic and contributing editor to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She may be reached at Suzanne.VanAtten@ajc.com.
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