Fall reading: Cozy up with these 5 books from Georgia authors

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Fall reading
Illustration by Lisk Feng

Among the Living
by Jonathan Rabb (Other Press), available 10/4
In his latest novel, Rabb considers the Jim Crow South through the lens of Jewish experience. In 1947, after losing nearly all of his family in the Holocaust, Yitzhak Goldah arrives in Savannah, where he relates far more to the South’s persecuted African Americans than to the members of what he finds to be a fractured Jewish community. Rabb sublimely navigates Yitzhak’s desperate search for something resembling the life he’d once known. —Anjali Enjeti

The Sleeping World
by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes (Touchstone)
In 1977 Spanish university student Mosca ditches her exams and small hometown to uncover what happened to her brother, Alexis, who disappeared in the final days of Francisco Franco’s brutal dictatorship. As Mosca and three friends cross Spain by foot and train, they discover a tumultuous country whose people are fighting to establish a new order. The novel is a bracing debut from Fuentes, a PhD student at the University of Georgia. —Anjali Enjeti

Bandit
by Molly Brodak (Grove Atlantic), available 10/4
Thirteen-year-old Molly Brodak spent the summer of 1994 playing endless games of Super Mario Bros. 3. Her father developed a different obsession that summer: robbing banks. His disguise—a fake mustache and newsboy cap—earned him the nickname “Super Mario Bros. Bandit,” while his crimes earned him two lengthy prison sentences. In her supremely readable memoir, Brodak attempts to make sense of her father—an enigmatic, larger-than-life character. —Tray Butler

Virgin and Other Stories
by April Ayers Lawson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), available 11/1
After Lawson published her short story “Virgin” in the Paris Review in 2010, it didn’t take long for the author to gather both a Plimpton Prize for Fiction and a book deal. The resulting debut is a collection of five stories about young people who are waking up to the world and all its complications. Lawson, a recent lecturer at Emory, sets her work in a deeply religious yet sensual South, underlining the region’s twin embrace of sin and salvation. —Jennifer Rainey Marquez

The Guineveres
by Sarah Domet (Flatiron Books), available 10/4
This debut novel, a coming-of-age tale set in a convent, tells the story of four teenage girls all inexplicably named Guinevere and all desperate to escape the Sisters of the Supreme Adoration. Domet’s lively writing is as original as her plot, which knits the Guineveres’ struggles together with stories of female saints. Poignant and often funny, Domet captures the fever of teenage desire by pinning it against the confines of a strict religious environment. —Tess Malone

This article originally appeared in our September 2016 issue.

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