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# A Haunting Southern Story Set in the Wild Mississippi Delta
Four years after Kelly Mustian's USA Today bestselling debut novel, The Girls in the Stilt House, delighted readers and started appearing on multiple "must-read" lists and earning starred reviews and garnering praise across the publishing industry, the author is set to release her much-anticipated second novel (on April 1, 2025). Like her first novel, this The River Knows Your Name is already gathering buzz as a tumultuous, "well-woven mystery."
Emily Matchar, author of In the Shadow of the Greenbrier, wrote, "You won't be able to put the book down until the last puzzle piece of their dual-timeline family mystery clicks into place."
Attend the Author Interview & Book Signing
Kelly Mustian will be in conversation with interviewer Jane Wood from 1 to 2 p.m. on Monday, April 7, at the Beaches Branch Library. Audience Q&A and a book signing will follow the interview. Note: A limited number of books will be available for sale on-site from a local bookstore partner.
Note: The program is made possible by the support of the Friends of the Beaches Branch Library.
The River Knows Your Name
For nearly thirty years, Nell has kept a childhood promise to never reveal what she and Evie found tucked inside a copy of Jane Eyre in their mother’s bookcase—a record of Evie’s birth listing a stranger as her mother. But lately, Nell has been haunted by hazy memories of their early life in Mississippi, years their reclusive mother, Hazel, has kept shrouded in secrecy. In dual storylines decades apart, Nell, forty-two in 1971, reaches into the past to uncover dangerous, long-buried secrets, and Becca, a young mother in the early 1930s, presses ahead, each moving toward 1934, the catastrophic year that would forever link them.
From a windswept ghost town long forgotten to a river house in notorious Natchez Under-the-Hill to a moody nightclub stage, Evie’s other mother emerges from the shadows of Depression-era Mississippi in a story of hardship and perseverance, of betrayal and trust, and of unexpected redemption in a world in which the lines between heroes and culprits are not always clearly drawn.
Kelly Mustian is the USA Today bestselling author of The Girls in the Stilt House and The River Knows Your Name. She is the recipient of the Mississippi Library Association’s 2023 Author Award for Fiction, and The Girls in the Stilt House was shortlisted for the 2022 Crook’s Corner Book Prize for best debut novel set in the American South. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and commercial magazines. Originally from Mississippi, she currently lives in North Carolina.
Read Her Work
Check out Kelly's books from the Library!
Did you know that all of our Lit Chat authors' books count toward your Jax Stacks Reading Challenge completion? Find out what authors we're hosting this month and join in on the fun!
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Catch the interview between Paterson Joseph and interviewer Kelsi Hasden from 7 to 8 p.m. on Monday, April 14 at Southeast Regional Library. A book signing will follow with books available for sale on site from Café Resistance Bookstore.
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