By; Tiffanie Gabrielse

If there was any theme to the past summer season, it’s that we like to metaphorically travel with fun, entertaining and lighthearted voices that keep us cool during the sweltering Southern heat. While nonfiction sales were generally good over the summer, I found fiction sales were better and can be best defined by an expletive.

Now, a few days after Labor Day, already the fall publishing season is in full swing. For retailers, autumn is filled with enthusiastic book lovers because when the seasons change, we start buzzing a little bit louder, our office phones ring more, and we need something to discuss around the water cooler. I keep asking myself, where should readers go in the fall?

encore book-club members have chimed in loud and clear with great titles eager for our attention. This fall reading means local names. Our lineup of writers this season includes many who have large and loyal fan bases—and not just here in Wilmington but beyond. So it’s time for us to ignore that Southern lingering humidity, and just imagine the autumnal colors taking over the cooler air as we plan our autumn travel guide. Here are the books to pack along the way:

Southern Poison
by: T. Lynn Ocean
One of those authors positioned securely in our lineup is T. Lynn Ocean, and she brings back our heroine who satisfied our appetite for a strong female protagonist. The sequel to the Jersey Barnes series promises to be better than ever. Now Jersey is taking her skills and her silicone-enhanced boobs to the private sector.

At the helm of her own personal security firm, she’s now able to pick and choose her clients. Working in the private sector rather than with the military, the risks should be minimal. Right? Perhaps now she might even have time to play on her boat, The Incognito. Picking up right where the first left off, we shouldn’t be able to put this sequel down.

The Bible Salesman
by: Clyde Edgerton
In this boisterous, meandering road novel of the post-World War II South, Preston Clearwater steals cars and passes himself off as an undercover FBI agent. His mark is naïve 20-year-old Bible salesman Henry Dampier, who, having found Jesus at the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, is on a mission to spread the word of God to the fundamentalist denizens of the Bible Belt.

Gradually, poor Henry is brainwashed to undertake more audacious forms of crime, while serious and solemn Henry has a reunion with his fundamentalist family, listens to his cousin’s scheme to market a new ad gimmick (called the bumper sticker), falls in love with roadside fruit-stand proprietor Marlene Greene and even manages to sell a few Bibles along the way.

The hitch: Henry will have to get wise to preserve all he has gained.

Tree Huggers
by: Judy Nichols
Written by Judy Nichols and readily available at Pomegranate Books, Tree Huggers centers around writer and single mom Kate Dennison. Sadly, Kate finds her new reporting job at a local newspaper is not at all what she bargained for. On her first day, two men die in a fire set by an aggressive environmentalist group called The Forces of Nature. Kate is assigned to cover the story, including the trial of the young man charged with the crime. As she works to unearth the truth, she begins to fear for her own safety and struggles to maintain her balance that results in the loss of her daughter, her freedom and even her life.

I Was a Teenage Dominatrix
by: Shawna Kenney
Introducing our first book-club memoir by local novelist Shawna Kenney! “You can only blame your parents for so much,” Kenney says in her breezy autobiography. In this easy-going, conversational-style piece, Kenney reveals how an intelligent college student, short on cash, finds dominatrix work a viable way of making ends meet—there’s no sex, it’s great money, and there’s plenty of time to study for finals. While Kenney’s career choice may be outrageous to some, the book is the perfect example of what a memoir is suppose to be.

Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral
by: Gayden Metcalfe
Though not a new release, Being Dead Is No Excuse... by Gayden Metcalfe seems to promise Southerners great laughs until the tears come, despite living in this uptight, power-obsessed society. Metcalfe, a lifelong Southerner who is said to be hiding out in the social circles of Greenville, Mississippi, exposes the culinary and cultural last rites of the deep South in a fashion that is as sidesplitting as it is politically incorrect, and as sincere as it is backstabbingly brutal.

Perhaps it caught my eye because I am originally a damn Yankee gradually converting to Southern hospitality. Either way, even if folks have never traveled south of Rochester, New York, this book will delight, entertain and give them the recipe for the suitable Southern send-off.

Only Revolutions
by: Mark Danielewski
From my favorite unconventional author, Mark Danielewski, is his follow-up novel to his previous 700-page opus, House of Leaves. Only Revolutions is a great change of pace for our book club and is also a great introductory piece for those unfamiliar with his previous work.

By comprising two monologues, one by main character Sam and the other by Hailey, Only Revolutions offers a dizzying tour of the modernist and post-modernist heights—and a similarly impressive tour de force. Each character gets 180 words per page but in type that gets smaller as they get closer to their ends, so they each gets exactly half a page only at the midway point of the book: page 180—or half of a revolution of 360 degrees.

Danielewski is sure to use narrative layering, multiple typefaces and typographical trickery to pull in readers. It’s classic Danielewski style that will no doubt keep book-club members talking long after winter.

ASIDE:
Other fiction novels perfect for the upcoming election year and definitely worth checking out are: Christopher Buckley’s Supreme Courtship, a satire of the judicial branch, and Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife, which fictionalizes first lady Laura Bush and is sure to give even the most conservative Republican a good belly laugh. For those unfamiliar with Sittenfeld, he is also the best-selling author of Prep, another novel imagining the private lives of American leaders.