Sunday, May 21, 2017

Writers4Higher family member Marina Brown releases new novel!

Marina Brown

A member of our Writers4Higher family releases her new novel Lisbeth.


Congratulations, Marina!
Here's what Marina has to share:


Can the quest for revenge remain alive after death?

On Buena Vista, a small Mississippi property, Claire Elliston finds herself compelled to rebuild the house her mother inhabited 40 years before. But the past and its evils come alive as the ruins are disturbed--laying bare the sins of a time when Jim Crow ruled the South, when depravity took place behind lace curtains, and when cross-race love could get you killed.

The unexplained arrival of a German doctor in the small community breaks open the past's layered secrets as Claire is torn between two allegiances —and perhaps two personalities. Dotted with colorfully naughty Southern humor, this strange saga leaps time and place as a black and a white family discover their shared need for retribution and their capacity for fidelity and love.


There is something about the South, isn’t there. Something that through its charm, its languid days and soft nights, the cadence of its drawls which are more like forgotten songs… that is… let’s be honest, a little scary.

Maybe it’s what used to happen there in oak groves where dark shadows played against white cloth. Where manners were the fabric covering naked cruelty. Where the tilt of the head or a fingertips’ graze could have somebody readying a rope. Yes, the possibility of something scary was always there.

At least that’s how I’d perceived the South. And I think much of that mystery, the unsettling part you sense when you pass cotton fields rimmed by rows of abandoned cabins or an unpainted building with a listing steeple….is still there. But there’s so much more.

In my stays in Mississippi I met women, lots of them, young, old, middle-life women who were hilariously funny, intensely generous, and utterly sincere. I heard their worries and their fears and the ways in which they supported one another— doing it within some sisterhood of the South they may be unknowable to the Northern-born. They did it with gentility and class, no matter their strata, and perhaps no matter how they really felt. These were Southern women who knew how to keep on ‘keepin’ on.’

Even though my last book, Land Without Mirrors, takes place on a mysterious Caribbean island, a land of lepers, the Mississippi of Lisbeth is no less exotic. And that is how I’ve attempted to chronicle the people and the place, the depravity and the decorum, the secrets of two generations that have come to life again.





So proud of you, Marina Brown. Godspeed on your writing!


Rhett DeVane 

webmaster/southern fiction authorwww.rhettdevane.com







Deep Thoughts, Bruises and All. First of all, Happy Holidays . No matter your outlook or what you celebrate, I wish you renewed ...