Hub City is excited to welcome author Harriet Cannon to the Shop for a reading, signing, and discussion of her new novel, Exiled South. A fast-paced, complex novel with a strong female protagonist and a sense of place in the American South, the book speaks to themes of family, history, and identity. Cannon will be joined in conversation by Scott Gould, one of Hub City Press's own.
This event is free and open to all, and refreshments will be served! Let us know you're coming and reserve your copy of the book at the link below!
Lizbeth Gordon, a school counselor and master at facilitating conflict resolution in everyone's life but her own, returns home to South Carolina after her husband's sudden death.
Seeking solace at the ramshackle family cottage, she walks the winter beach, but the quiet life doesn't last. An elderly aunt has troubling family stories: a blockade runner hunted as a traitor after the fall of Charleston, and ancestors who disappeared during Civil War Reconstruction. Curiosity drives Lizbeth into roots research that dead ends.
Tentacles of the past reach across the continents when Lizbeth takes a job at an international school in Rio de Janeiro. She meets a multiethnic descendant of Confederate exiles, with the Gordon surname and nineteenth-century documents. Robert Gordon's letters describe bold escapes from Federal blockaders and Civil War intrigue in Scotland. Laurette Gordon's diary shares a heart-wrenching story of sacrifice.
Can the keys to generations-long secrets open a path to family reconciliation and healing?
Harriet Cannon is a writer with roots in South Carolina. As a psychotherapist, she served as a consultant to the Boeing Company, international schools, and worked for the US State Department in Chile. Harriet is co-author of Mixed Blessings: A Guide to Multicultural and Multiethnic Relationships. Exiled South is her debut novel. Harriet and her husband live on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington and have to grown children.
Scott Gould’s first book, Strangers to Temptation—a linked story collection the Atlanta Journal Constitution called “a compulsive read” and Foreword Reviews dubbed “funny, often poignant, and not easily forgotten”—was published by Hub City Press in 2017. Of his debut novel, Whereabouts (Koehler Books), was called “distinctly Southern but gritty, without a whiff of moonlight and magnolias.” Gould’s memoir, Things That Crash, Things That Fly (Vine Leaves Press), was recently named a finalist in the 2021 Indies Today Awards and one of 2021’s best by the Independent Book Review. His newest novel, The Hammerhead Chronicles, will be published by the University of North Georgia Press in 2022 and a second collection of stories, Idiot Men, is scheduled for publication in 2023. Gould’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Kenyon Review, New Stories from the South, Black Warrior Review, Reckon Review, Pangyrus, Carolina Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, storySouth, Garden & Gun, New Ohio Review, Crazyhorse and The Bitter Southerner, among others.