Book List: Four juicy late-summer reads from Georgia writers to fend off fall 

It’s still summertime and the reading is still easy, even if the kids are heading back to school. Whether you are reaching for an escapist “beach read” or something a little more ruminative on the big questions, these Georgia writers deliver. The through line? Colorful characters with pluck who ultimately get what they need.

A Priest Walks into a Waffle House: Stories from a Gritty, Grace-Filled Life
by Lauretta Hannon
Mercer University Press, August 2026

Hannon is getting serious — but not somber. The humorist is out with another memoir about her journey from hoyden heathen to woman of faith, in the mold of Rachel Held Evans. Hannon has established herself as a sort of avatar of empowerment for the polyester-clad woman who has overcome adversity. Folksy and fun, she has always been blazingly candid about her dysfunctional, loving, backwoods upbringing — the addictions, the grinding poverty, the domestic violence and bizarre Southern Gothic mischief. Irreverently reverent, she has found some peace now and it shows. 

This is not a conventional memoir but a collection of bite-sized, stand-alone pieces, drawn in part from her column for The Georgia Bulletin, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Atlanta. Some of the gut-punching chapters take the form of prose poems — one citing an uncle with “candy in his pants pocket / But you had to reach in to get it.” Read it to see why Hannon has become the most prominent Southern Catholic moralist since Flannery O’Connor. 

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Smith’s Walk
by John Turner
BookLogix, March 2026

If you enjoy unsettling dystopian fiction against a lush backdrop, this ripping yarn is for you. The novel is Turner’s second book. His first was a meditative memoir of his experience hiking the Appalachian Trail. This sure-footed volume, set in the year 2037, is speculative fiction about what happens to one of our most treasured natural resources under authoritarianism, and it should ring some alarm bells. Frank Aaronson is an 87-year-old contrarian who is attempting to set the record as the oldest hiker to complete the trail. His flinty cussedness is entertaining as he encounters and outwits a motley cast of characters along the way, including the jack-booted thugs who now try to micromanage Mother Nature. 

In prose as crystalline as a mountain brook, Turner shows how the trail functions as a bellwether for democracy: It is a long, winding metaphor for freedom, with peaks and valleys. And his nature writing captures what it’s like to be alone in the woods: “The startlingly loud crackle of the cellophane when he opened a pack of crackers made him wince.” Despite hardships, the character ultimately finds redemption. Think James Dickey meets Margaret Atwood.

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Gowanus Crossing: A Brooklyn Boyhood
by Vincent Coppola
Henry Holt & Company, June 2026


If a book could talk with its hands, this one surely would. Vince Coppola — a “mope” born of a longshoreman — returns home for this ode to pre-hipster Brooklyn. The usual cast of characters is here — wiseguys and pedophile priests, all operating under ironclad omerta — but Coppola’s elegant, elegiac writing lends them a compelling freshness. Some of the nicknames are offensive, others hilarious: “I’m a reader, not a valuable skill set, so I’m Vinnie the Boob.”

Coppola clearly is not endorsing the cruelty — he is just reporting facts, as he once did for Newsweek, and manages to find “a magic circle often irrational and violent but tender and intensely protective of its own.” Have gabagool handy.

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Road Trip
by Mary Kay Andrews
St. Martin’s Press, June 2026

Mary Kay Andrews is the pen name of Kathy Hogan Trocheck, who once upon a time worked as a journalist at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She brings a reporter’s eagle eye to minute detail in her very satisfying women’s fiction, which usually involves a cozy mystery, an old family secret, some sparks of romance and a little female bonding. In her latest, she gets ancestral, exploring her Irish roots with all the can-do self-assurance of St. Brigid. 

The narrative follows estranged sisters Maeve and Therese Dunigan who, after their mother’s death, embark on an adventure across the pond to verify the authenticity of an heirloom painting. Along the way, they encounter some blarney-tongued men, of course; Andrews, in her dialogue, is adept at rendering smooth talkers. The novel functions as a pleasing picaresque and travelogue, with all loose ends tied up in a perfect Celtic knot. If you can’t make it to Dublin, this is the next best thing.

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Candice Dyer’s work has appeared in magazines such as Atlanta, Garden&Gun, Men’s Journal and Country Living. She is the author of Street Singers, Soul Shakers, Rebels with a Cause: Music from Macon.