From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller  Devil in the Grove, the gripping true story of a small town with a big secret.

In December 1957, the wife of a Florida citrus baron is raped in her home while her husband is away. She claims a "husky Negro" did it, and the sheriff, the infamous racist Willis McCall, does not hesitate to round up a herd of suspects. But within days, McCall turns his sights on Jesse Daniels, a gentle, mentally impaired white nineteen-year-old. Soon Jesse is railroaded up to the state hospital for the insane, and locked away without trial.

But crusading journalist Mabel Norris Reese cannot stop fretting over the case and its baffling outcome. Who was protecting whom, or what? She pursues the story for years, chasing down leads, hitting dead ends, winning unlikely allies. Bit by bit, the unspeakable truths behind a conspiracy that shocked a community into silence begin to surface.

Beneath a Ruthless Sun tells a powerful, page-turning story rooted in the fears that rippled through the South as integration began to take hold, sparking a surge of virulent racism that savaged the vulnerable, debased the powerful, and roils our own times still.

In  Southern Writers on Writing , Susan Cushman collects twenty-six writers from across the South whose work celebrates southern culture and shapes the landscape of contemporary southern literature. Contributors hail from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida.

Contributors like Lee Smith, Michael Farris Smith, W. Ralph Eubanks, and Harrison Scott Key, among others, explore issues like race, politics, and family and the apex of those issues colliding. It discusses landscapes, voices in the South, and how writers write. The anthology is divided into six sections, including "Becoming a Writer"; "Becoming a Southern Writer"; "Place, Politics, People"; "Writing about Race"; "The Craft of Writing"; and "A Little Help from My Friends."

Join us on Tuesday when Susan Cushman, Jim Dees, Ralph Eubanks, and Michael Farris Smith discuss the book.

After a traumatizing adolescence and self-destructive young adulthood, Amy resolves to lead a quiet life helping through the simple austerity of the neighborhood Catholic Church. It's in the midst of this stewardship that she finds herself witness to an act of what seems to be random violence. Though horrified, the thrill and danger of the act draw Amy further and further back into a world of moral ambivalence, desperation, and horizons that extend beyond a few blocks in  Brooklyn. Faced with old lovers, estranged relatives, and an unreliable potential partner in crime, Amy finds herself at a crossroads between who she was, who she wishes to be, and perhaps something altogether different from either.  Boyle's slow burn and twisty mystery delivers a clever spin on the woman-in-peril trope giving us a complicated but always sympathetic heroine and makes for an engrossing and honest read about the shaping and portrayal of self and the frightening (or is it freeing?) mutability of our destinies. -- KO

William Boyle is from Brooklyn, New York. His debut novel,  Gravesend, was published as #1,000 in the Rivages/Noir collection in France, where it was shortlisted for the Prix Polar SNCF 2017 and nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. Boyle is also the author of a book of short stories,  Death Don't Have No Mercy, and of another novel,  Tout est Brisé, recently released in France by Gallmeister. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

A storytime for Children's Book Week featuring a very special guest.

Rick  Bragg's readers love his writing about family, and when this writer starts talking about food, and his mama's cooking, best to just get out of the way. Or his granddaddy, for that matter: "He crumbled fried cornbread into two glasses, poured in cold buttermilk, put in a dash of salt and pepper, and stuck in two blades of fresh green onion and two spoons.   It was funny how such a simple thing could be so good."    Rick  Bragg has been coming to Square Books -- thankfully -- since All Over But the Shoutin', and we always leave his events happy and a bit awestruck. Don't miss him on this one, or give us a call for a signed copy. -- RH

Rick Bragg is the author of seven books, including the best-selling  Ava's Man and  All Over but the Shoutin'. He is also a regular contributor to  Garden & Gun magazine. He lives in Alabama.