It seems as though the lion's share of attention that debut novels receive generally emanates from the area in which the author resides, or from the locale in which the plot unfolds. In conjunction with the various fall trade shows, we thought it might be interesting to highlight some forthcoming debuts in the context of these regional connections.

Midsouth/Southeast

Buoyed by a bundle of enthusiastic blurbs from such writers as Kaye Gibbons and Anne Rivers Siddons, A False Sense of Well Being by Jeanne Braselton sends Ballantine's hopes high for this October hardcover. Its darkly humorous plot concerns a 38-year-old Georgian woman who can't stop herself from imagining creative ways to bring about the untimely demise of her husband of 11 years. Braselton lives in Rome, Georgia.

"Lay That Trumpet in Our Hands tells how a white family takes on the Ku Klux Klan because of a murder," says Bantam executive editor Kate Miciak. "They join with the local African-American community to stand up against injustice." The events in the February novel take place in central Florida in 1951, which is where author Susan Carol McCarthy grew up, although she now lives in California. "Her family was actually involved in an incident like this, but this is fiction with a 12-year-old girl as the narrator," says Miciak.

The folks at William Morrow evoke Steel Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes when talking about The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc (Nov.) by Loraine Despres. "It's a humorous novel about serious subjects like adultery and murder," says executive editor Claire Wachtel. "One thing that impressed me was how well she created a world of people without using shorthand." Shorthand might have been expected from a writer like Despres, who pens scripts and is best known for writing the famous "Who Shot J.R.?" episode for Dallas. Her novel is set in Gentry, La., in the middle '50s, and Despres, now living in California, was raised in the southern part of the state.

Clay McLeod Chapman has family and a strong following in Richmond, Va., says Hyperion/Theia executive editor Peternelle van Arsdale. Now a Brooklynite, Chapman has been writing plays since the age of 12 and performing monologues around the country. These monologues now form a cluster of stories in Rest Area (Feb. 2002), "one of the most original pieces of fiction I've ever read," says van Arsdale.

New Atlantic Independent Bookseller's Association

"East Libertytraces a little boy's life in a kind of seedy Pittsburgh neighborhood from the time he is five until he's about to be confirmed at 13," says E.R. Olefsky, managing editor at Banks Channel Books. "It's a Catholic Italian-American coming-of-age story in the '50s and '60s," she adds, "and East Liberty, the neighborhood, is like a character in the book." Author Joseph Bathanti, who won the Carolina Novel Award from Banks Channel with this book, teaches at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C.

Manalapan, N.J., a tiny town in the middle of the state, is the home of Philip Danze. A copywriter for over 30 years and still going strong, the 72-year-old will see his first novel published in October by GreyCore Press of Pine Bush, N.Y. It is Conjuring Maud, the fourth book to be published by this small house. "The novel is about a man's obsession with an older woman," says publisher Joan Schweighardt. "The Maud of the title is based on Mary Kingsley, an explorer and a feminist ahead of her time who was very interested in how the natives of West Africa lived." Conjuring Maud takes place in Africa and England in the 19th century. "Philip himself was obsessed with Mary Kingsley when he was writing the book," says Schweighardt. "He's a very charming man, one with old-world charm, like David Niven." GreyCore is distributed by Seven Hills.

Dorothy J. Samuels is a longtime member of the New York Times editorial board and lives in New York City. "Laugh out loud funny" is what political commentator Cokie Roberts calls Samuels's novel Filthy Rich (Morrow, Sept.). The yarn traces the travails of Marcy Mallowitz, a woman dumped on the air after she flubs the lifeline question put to her by her fiancé as he appears on the popular TV quiz show, So You Want to Be Filthy Rich! Marcy is subsequently the subject of a David Letterman Top-Ten List, and from there it is only a short step to becoming the nation's latest media star.

Thrills of another stripe put their mark on Sympathy for the Devil: An Angela Bivens Thriller (Crown, Sept.) by Christopher Chambers, a former attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice. Described as an African-American Clarice Starling (from Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter novels), Bivens is a special agent who takes on the FBI as she attempts to ascertain the truth behind mysterious deaths of young people in Washington, D.C.'s poorest neighborhoods. Chambers lives a bit farther south, in Charlotte, N.C.

"The Book of Fred [Washington Square Press, Sept.] takes place in Maryland," says Greer Hendricks, Pocket Books/WSP senior editor. Its author, Abby Bardi, lives in Ellicott City, Md., a Baltimore suburb. "A teenaged girl has been raised within a religious cult, and when two of her brothers die mysteriously, she's placed in foster care," explains Hendricks. "The mother in the new family is a librarian, who lives with both her brother and her sullen teenaged daughter. The book is really about creating a family for yourself with people who are not your blood relatives."

Pantheon makes a Baltimore connection, too, with Sap Rising (Sept.) by city native Christine Lincoln, whose gritty stories with African-American protagonists are set in the Maryland town of Grandville. Lincoln has already earned reams of local and national publicity for her personal triumphs over poverty, drugs and sexual abuse.

Pacific NW/Calif.

Any Small Thing Can Save You: A Bestiary (Putnam/BlueHen, Nov.) by Christina Adam has 26 sections, one for each letter of the alphabet. "Each of the vignettes has a signal animal," says Fred Ramey, one of BlueHen's founding editors, "and the animals' appearances pass through the characters' lives at emotionally dangerous moments." According to Ramey, the pieces deal with women's relationships with husbands, lovers, sons. Adam, who divides her time between Idaho and Texas, sets the vignettes in both locales. "The animals are part of the natural world and provide threads that the characters can pick up to find peace," says Ramey. "However, the response is not just to the animals, but to the environment as well."

Although most of the drama in Aria (Bridge Works, Sept.) takes place in upstate New York, author Susan Segal lives south of L.A., and the incident that inspired the novel received considerable press coverage in California. "Ariais a serious novel that explores the psychology of loss and the means of putting one's life back together," says Alexandra Shelley, deputy editorial director. An accident that befalls a family at sea eventually leads the survivor to take refuge in the home of an aging opera diva, whose intentions are not the kindest. "The actual accident happened in 1995," says co-publisher Warren Phillips, "when a family of four did sail out from California and were hit by a freighter. Susan's book, though, is totally fiction. It deals with the aftermath and her character's recovery."

Michael Sheridan lives in Sedro Woolley, Wash., and his novel, The Violent Child (Permanent Press, Sept.) is set somewhere in the Midwest. Its protagonist is Teddie Durban, a college English professor, who goes to visit his elderly mother, on whom cigarettes and alcohol have taken their toll. Their past was sorely troubled, but the two share a fondness for bourbon, a beverage they consume while recalling what came before and then, at last, coming to terms with one another.

Three generations of an African-American family provide the focus for Leaving (St. Martin's, Feb. 2002) by Richard Dry of El Cerrito, Calif. A grandmother, her half-brother, her daughter and her daughter's children move to California in 1959, where they struggle to build sound lives as drugs take over the neighborhoods. Says SMP editor-in-chief George Witte, "Leaving has a broad historical background from the early '60s to the present, as cities declined, but it is also intimate with its characters. It will appeal to readers of Richard Price and Russell Banks." Witte first read the manuscript not knowing that Richard Dry is white. "He has worked with troubled teens in urban areas, so he really knows the territory," says Witte.

A totally different California stars in America the Beautiful (Scribner paper, Sept.) by Moon Unit Zappa, daughter of legendary composer Frank Zappa. Autobiographical elements surface in this story of America Thorne, which Scribner describes as "an affecting and very funny novel about love, heartbreak and the complexities of growing up as hippie royalty." Because of her show biz lineage, Moon Unit Zappa, who lives in Hollywood, is expected to generate a convincing buzz.

Mountains and Plains

Colorado resident Sarah A. Hoyt has an M.A. in English and Literature. Her scholarly pursuits must have come to her naturally, since she has been a Shakespearean aficionado since age 12. Ill Met by Moonlight (Ace, Oct.), which takes its title from a line in A Midsummer Night's Dream, reimagines the Bard's first love and what occurs when his young wife and newborn daughter are abducted by the crafty ruler of elves and fairies.

Just above Colorado is Wyoming, where Last Year's River (Houghton Mifflin, Oct.) by Allen Morris Jones is set. Not long after WWI, a New York debutante pregnant from a rape is sent by her mother to have the child at a ranch in Wyoming. There she becomes involved with a man recovering both from the war's ravages and his abusive father. "Allen [who is a Montanan] portrays a continuity, a transition from a working cattle ranch to a dude ranch, from work to leisure," says HM senior editor Anton Muller. "He creates a beautiful sense of place where East meets West. He's also a serious writer with an instinctive sense for old-fashioned storytelling."

Kansas is Mary O'Connell's home state, where about half the stories in Living with Saints(Atlantic Monthly Press, Oct.) are set. "Actually, the women in those stories are hoping to get out of Kansas," says Grove/Atlantic senior editor Elisabeth Schmitz. "The collection is an irreverent and sassy look at how Catholicism infiltrates the women's daily lives." The tone, suggests Schmitz, is more Madonna than Mother Teresa.

Brad Thor hosts a travel show on PBS called Traveling Lite, and the launch pad for his own travels is Park City, Utah. Nearby Colorado is where the action really takes off in his thriller, The Lions of Lucerne(Pocket Books, Jan. 2002). The U.S. president is kidnapped in the Centennial State while enjoying a ski holiday, and the chase is on through the Middle East and then to Switzerland and the stunning scenery of Bern, Interlaken and Lucerne.

In Warren J. Stucki's Boy's Pond (Sunstone Press, Dec.), a more somber Utah is the recipient of deadly radioactive particles following the 126 nuclear detonations at Nevada's Yucca Flats in the 1950s. "Warren wrote the book because he is a doctor who has treated people who have been affected by these explosions," says Sunstone president James Clois Smith Jr. "This is a real cause for him." Living in St. George, Utah, Stucki says, "Many of the victims that were exposed to airborne materials downwind of the tests are either patients or personal acquaintances of mine. I hope my novel helps bring more attention to their plight."

New England

Poncha Press of Morrison, Colo., is now all of 19 months old, and president Barbara Osgood-Hartness reaches outside her own geographical setting to publish Gemini (Sept.) by Michael Burns. "Michael lives in Concord, N.H.," says Osgood-Hartness, "and his book is set in rural Vermont. The primary character is Jack Scanlon, a man struggling to overcome his demons as he returns to his hometown in the late '60s with a new identity. Due to his excessive drinking, he has lost his wife and young daughter and, subsequently, his engineering job." Scanlon becomes a high school science teacher and wrestles with his ambivalence about the war in Vietnam. "It's an introspective book that's humorous and yet deals with serious issues," says the publisher.

Tim Westmoreland, who lives in Amherst, Mass., is the author of Good as Any (Harcourt, Jan. 2002), a collection of stories set in a variety of locales from New England to Texas. The subjects include people who are ill and dying, others who are disadvantaged and some for whom life is attainable only on the margins. Westmoreland says, "My life and my work are intricately connected. My diabetes, my partial blindness, my failing kidneys, my loss of feeling in my extremities, my bouts with excruciating pain which leave me sleepless for days at a time, all influence when and how I write, the matters that I write about and the urgency with which I approach life and art."

Now living in Andover, Mass., Susan O'Neill worked as an army nurse at three hospitals in 1969-70 South Vietnam and married an American soldier she met there. With her three children now grown, she turned to fiction, which is collected in Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Vietnam(Ballantine, Nov.). The title, explains the publisher, was a saying that had a currency among nurses who had to find an indifference and an irony that could help them survive the nearly unsurvivable.

Maine provides the setting for Nectar (Forge, Feb. 2002) by David Fickett, who lives in Winter Harbor, Me. "It's rural Maine from the 1920s to the 1950s," says associate editor Stephanie Lane. The land is not hospitable to farming, and poverty hovers overhead as a mother makes sacrifices to keep the family afloat. "The main character, Regina, inherits the practice of keeping bees from her father, and she learns to identify with them. David includes information about beekeeping and about queen bees and worker bees, which become a metaphor for Regina's family."

Great Lakes/Upper Midwest

My Suburban Shtetl: A Novel About Life in a 20th Century Jewish-American Village(Syracuse Univ. Press, Oct.) by Robert Rand revisits the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Ill., as young Bobby Bakalchuk grows up in the '60s and '70s. Skokie, where Rand was raised, was also the site of the highly controversial march proposed by American Nazis, which the Supreme Court ruled could take place in the summer of 1978—although, in the end, the Nazis bypassed Skokie for Chicago itself. The main character's grandfather lived through the Holocaust, says marketing manager Theresa Litz, "and the story is about people grappling with life in the Midwest in the middle of a diverse population."

When October Brown, a 23-year-old teacher in Kansas, becomes pregnant in 1950 after an ill-advised affair, she returns home to Ohio, to the two aunts who raised her after her mother was murdered. Such is the situation in October Suite(Random, Oct.) by Maxine Clair. Also living in Ohio is October's sister Vergie, to whom she gives her newborn boy, thereby setting in motion a family conflict over the child's future. Clair lives in Maryland and teaches at George Washington University.

Cleveland is the Midwestern setting for Bittersweet (Ballantine/One World, Jan. 2002) by Freddie Lee Johnson III. "This is the story of three brothers," says One World director Anita Diggs. "One is going through a divorce, and the others try to help him, while also attempting to make their own marriages work." The book thus challenges the stereotype of African-American men's weak family ties. This, says Diggs, is a book that will appeal to readers of Bebe Moore Campbell. Johnson lives in Holland, Mich., where he is a professor of history at Hope College.

Spilling Clarence (Hyperion/Theia, Jan. 2002) by Anne Ursu is both whimsical and touching, says executive editor Peternelle van Arsdale. In it, a pharmaceutical factory accidentally causes a chemical spill in the fictional town of Clarence, Minn. Afterward, the citizens find that their memories all come flooding back, and they are snared by their own reminiscences about love and war, family members they've lost and sins they've committed. Ursu was born in Minneapolis and now lives in California.

Adult Trade Books—Regional Buying Patterns by Outlets
Large chain bookstores are well developed in the New England and Mid-Atlantic states. Mid-Atlantic book-buying households also shop at independent/small chain bookstores as do Southern households. New Englanders have embraced the Internet to a greater degree than the country overall.

%Units (2000) U.S. Total New England Mid-Atlantic South Midsouth Midwest Mtns & Plains West Coast
Independent/Small Chain Bookstores 14.8 11.8 16.2 17.6 15.1 13.3 13.2 14.5
Large Chain Bookstores 23.7 31.0 28.1 20.0 17.4 22.6 21.1 25.7
Mass Merchandisers 5.9 2.8 4.5 6.6 11.7 7.2 5.0 3.4
Discount Stores 3.2 2.8 2.2 3.2 4.0 5.6 2.1 1.9
Food/Drug Stores 3.1 3.6 3.2 3.2 3.0 2.8 4.0 2.9
Price Clubs 6.6 8.7 6.8 5.9 7.6 4.3 6.3 8.2
Multimedia 0.8 0.4 0.4 1.1 1.2 0.6 2.5 0.4
Used Bookstores 2.9 1.5 1.7 4.5 2.8 2.8 4.9 2.6
Book Clubs 18.6 11.5 17.6 18.9 18.9 17.4 19.3 21.7
Mail Order 3.4 2.8 3.3 3.2 3.1 4.3 4.8 2.6
Internet 7.1 15.1 6.8 6.7 6.3 6.1 7.1 7.2
All Other 9.8 8.0 9.1 9.1 8.9 12.9 9.7 8.9
Ipsos-NPD BookTrends