The New Inheritors

Kent Wascom

Summary

Wascom’s third novel is his most accessible yet – The New Inheritors has the power and historical depth that imbued The Blood of Heaven and Secessia but the history is less distant and the concerns more modern. At once a poignant and powerful love story, and a tale of a family driven apart by greed, the book has great energy and propulsion as well as Wascom’s brilliantly rich language and historical detail.

The New Inheritors is the third part in a quartet of books that tells the story of America from 1800 to the present day through the legacy of one family living in the Gulf Coast of the United States. From the Louisiana purchase to the Civil War to the great rise of industrial business and beyond, the quartet is an American epic, and this is the central book.

The New Inheritors touches on the history of many themes that are often thought of as contemporary. One of the central characters is gay and is cast out of his family after this secret is revealed. Although primarily set in New Orleans and the Mississippi Coast, the novel also makes forays to Cuba and Nicaragua and includes Latino and African-American characters whose position and possibilities in life are vastly different from the central Woolsack family. Questions of anti-war protest, adoption, and environmentalism also shadow the main action of the novel.

For readers of Paulette Jiles, Anthony Doerr, Luis Alberto Urrea, Philip Meyer, and Ann Patchett (all of whom we are approaching for blurbs).

Wascom has received astonishingly laudatory reviews for his previous books and we expect the same for this title. The Blood of Heaven was an NPR and Washington Post best book of the year and was a semifinalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.

Other books that might interest you

Bellagrand - A Novel

Paullina Simons

From internationally bestselling author Paullina Simons comes another compelling saga of heartbreak and redemption, and the devastating love story that led to The Bronze Horseman 
Love was just the beginning of their journey 
Gina and Harry gave up everything to be together. But they both want different things—from their marriage, from life, from each other . . . and from the shifting world around them. 
Gina, independent, compassionate, and strong, desperately wants a family. Harry, idealistic and fiercely political, wants to create a better world, a better country. At a crossroads and at cross-purposes, they pursue their opposing dreams at great cost to themselves and those near to them. Through years of passion and turmoil they rail, rage, and break each other's hearts, only to come face-to-face with a stark final choice that will forever determine their destiny. 
Their journey takes them through four decades and two continents, from extreme poverty to great wealth, from the wooden planks of the troubled immigrant town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, to the marble halls and secret doors of a mystical place called . . . Bellagrand.

Show book

The Alice Network - A Novel

Kate Quinn

Featuring an exclusive excerpt from Kate Quinn's next incredible historical novel, THE HUNTRESS
NEW YORK TIMES & USA TODAY BESTSELLER
#1 GLOBE AND MAIL HISTORICAL FICTION BESTSELLER
One of NPR's Best Books of the Year!
One of Bookbub's Biggest Historical Fiction Books of the Year!
Reese Witherspoon Book Club Summer Reading Pick!
The Girly Book Club Book of the Year!
A Summer Book Pick from Good Housekeeping, Parade, Library Journal, Goodreads, Liz and Lisa, and BookBub
In an enthralling new historical novel from national bestselling author Kate Quinn, two women—a female spy recruited to the real-life Alice Network in France during World War I and an unconventional American socialite searching for her cousin in 1947—are brought together in a mesmerizing story of courage and redemption.
1947. In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive. So when Charlie's parents banish her to Europe to have her "little problem" taken care of, Charlie breaks free and heads to London, determined to find out what happened to the cousin she loves like a sister.
1915. A year into the Great War, Eve Gardiner burns to join the fight against the Germans and unexpectedly gets her chance when she's recruited to work as a spy. Sent into enemy-occupied France, she's trained by the mesmerizing Lili, the "Queen of Spies", who manages a vast network of secret agents right under the enemy's nose.
Thirty years later, haunted by the betrayal that ultimately tore apart the Alice Network, Eve spends her days drunk and secluded in her crumbling London house. Until a young American barges in uttering a name Eve hasn't heard in decades, and launches them both on a mission to find the truth...no matter where it leads.
“Both funny and heartbreaking, this epic journey of two courageous women is an unforgettable tale of little-known wartime glory and sacrifice. Quinn knocks it out of the park with this spectacular book!”—Stephanie Dray, New York Times bestselling author of America's First Daughter

Show book

Catalina Ghost Stories...

Jim Musgrave

Stories from Catalina Island that will give you insight into how the mind works and how supernatural beings exist here and in the hereafter. Award-winning author Jim Musgrave presents these four stories to pay tribute to an island where many strange events have happened and where you can visit to see for yourself whether the legends are true.

Show book

The Quiet American

Graham Greene

A “masterful . . . brilliantly constructed novel” of love and chaos in 1950s Vietnam (Zadie Smith, The Guardian).   It’s 1955 and British journalist Thomas Fowler has been in Vietnam for two years covering the insurgency against French colonial rule. But it’s not just a political tangle that’s kept him tethered to the country. There’s also his lover, Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman who clings to Fowler for protection. Then comes Alden Pyle, an idealistic American working in service of the CIA. Devotedly, disastrously patriotic, he believes neither communism nor colonialism is what’s best for Southeast Asia, but rather a “Third Force”: American democracy by any means necessary. His ideas of conquest include Phuong, to whom he promises a sweet life in the states. But as Pyle’s blind moral conviction wreaks havoc upon innocent lives, it’s ultimately his romantic compulsions that will play a role in his own undoing.   Although criticized upon publication as anti-American, Graham Greene’s “complex but compelling story of intrigue and counter-intrigue” would, in a few short years, prove prescient in its own condemnation of American interventionism (The New York Times).

Show book

Refuge - A Novel

Merilyn Simonds

To whom do we offer refuge — and why?
 
After a life that rubbed up against the century’s great events in New York City, Mexico, and Montreal, 96-year-old Cassandra MacCallum is surviving well enough, alone on her island, when a young Burmese woman contacts her, claiming to be kin. Curiosity, loneliness, and a slender filament of hope prompts the old woman to accept a visit. But Nang’s story of torture and flight provokes memories in Cass that peel back, layer by layer, the events that brought her to this moment — and forces her, against her will, to confront the tragedy she has refused for half a century. Could her son really be Nang’s grandfather? What does she owe this girl, who claims to be stateless because of her MacCallum blood? Drawn, despite herself, into Nang’s search for refuge, Cass struggles to accept the past and find a way into whatever future remains to her.

Show book

The Falcon at the Portal - An...

Elizabeth Peters

New York Times Bestseller 
From New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Peters comes another riveting mystery in her phenomenally popular Amelia Peabody series. 
The Land of the Pharaohs harbors more secrets than any tomb can hide. 
In Egypt for the 1911 archaeological season, Amelia Peabody and her family are not anticipating trouble, but it finds them nonetheless. Their young friend David is accused of selling ancient artifacts, and it's up to the Emersons to expose the real culprit. But the body of an American discovered at the bottom of their excavation shaft and a child of mysterious antecedents are sparking twin crises that threaten to tear the family apart. Amelia brings her estimable powers of deduction to bear, but she might not survive long enough to unravel more than one perplexing puzzle—because suddenly someone is shooting bullets in her direction...and coming too close for comfort! 
“Amelia is rather like Indiana Jones, Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple all rolled into one.”—Washington Post Book World

Show book