As we prepare to bid good-bye to 2016, the editors of Lone Star Literary Life would like to say thank you to all of the authors who have written books about our state or set in our state, but we’d like pay special recognition to our Favorite Texas Fiction of 2016.
We winnowed down an internal list of titles reviewed in Lone Star Literary issues during 2016 and placed it out on our social media as a survey.
This year’s selections reflect the diversity, tastes, and range of the state and its readers, from middle-grades and YA to fans of historical fiction, suspense, and western books. Here’s our list, in no particular order, with publishers’ descriptions and links to Lone Star Literary Life’s reviews and interviews.
And of course, you still have a full week for gift-buying—and nearly two weeks remaining in 2016 to catch up with us on your reading!
TEXAS MYSTERY / SUSPENSE
Amy Gentry
Good as Gone: A Novel of Suspense
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Hardcover, 978-0-544-92095-8 (also available as an ebook, an audio book, and on Audible), 288 pgs., $23.00
July 26, 2016
Thirteen-year-old Julie Whitaker was kidnapped from her bedroom in the middle of the night, witnessed only by her younger sister. Her family was shattered, but managed to stick together, hoping against hope that Julie is still alive. And then one night: the doorbell rings. A young woman who appears to be Julie is finally, miraculously, home safe. The family is ecstatic—but Anna, Julie’s mother, has whispers of doubts. She hates to face them. She cannot avoid them. When she is contacted by a former detective turned private eye, she begins a torturous search for the truth about the woman she desperately hopes is her daughter.
Author Amy Gentry’s Good as Gone will appeal to fans of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, and keep readers guessing until the final pages. Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
YA HISTORICAL FICTION
Ashley Hope Pérez
Carolrhoda Lab
Hardcover, 978-1467742023 (also available as an ebook), 408 pgs., $18.99
September 1, 2015
Out of Darkness is a work of historical young adult fiction, loosely based on an actual school explosion that took place in New London, Texas, in 1937. Ashley Hope Perez has taken the explosion as her backdrop and imagined a diverse cast of characters whose broken lives are entangled with the school and the explosion. The central story is that of two teenagers: Naomi, who is Mexican, and Wash, who is black. It’s a gripping novel about race, segregation, love, and the forces that destroy people.
Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
HISTORICAL FICTION
Leila Meacham
Grand Central Publishing
Hardcover, 978-1455533831 (also available in paperback and as an ebook, an audiobook, and on Audible), 608 pgs., $26.00
April 12, 2016
Texas in the early 1900s, its inhabitants still traveling by horseback and barely familiar with the telephone, was on the cusp of an oil boom that, unbeknownst to its residents, would spark a period of dramatic changes and economic growth. In the midst of this transformative time in Southern history, two unforgettable characters emerge and find their fates irrevocably intertwined: Samantha Gordon, the privileged heiress to the sprawling Las Tres Lomas cattle ranch near Fort Worth, and Nathan Holloway, a sweet-natured and charming farm boy from far north Texas. As changes sweep the rustic countryside, Samantha and Nathan’s connection drives this narrative compulsively forward as they love, lose, and betray. Titans, a grand yet intimate novel, delivers a big-canvas story full of surprising twists and emotional resonance. Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
Read our Lone Star Listens interview with author Leila Meacham here.
MIDDLE GRADE FICTION
Karen Harrington
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 978-0-316-29801-8, hardcover (also available as an ebook), 352 pgs, $16.99
May 24, 2016
Texas novelist Karen Harrington has created a powerful coming-of-age story about the importance of finding your voice. Wayne Kovok lives in a world of After. After his uncle in the army was killed overseas. After Wayne and his mother survived a plane crash while coming back from the funeral. After he lost his voice. Wayne has always used his love of facts to communicate (“Did you know more people die each year from shaking a vending machine than from shark attacks?”). Without his voice, how will he wow the prettiest girl in school? How will he stand up to his drill-sergeant grandfather? And how will he share his hopes with his deadbeat dad? It’s not until Wayne loses his voice completely that he realizes how much he doesn’t say. Filled with heart and humor, Mayday tackles an unforgettable journey of family and friendship.
Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
HISTORICAL FICTION/THRILLER
Melissa Lenhardt
Sawbones (A Laura Elliston Novel)
Redhook
Ebook, B0124TQ3Z0, 358 pgs., $3.99
March 29, 2016
A fast-paced historical debut by Melissa Lenhardt. When Dr. Catherine Bennett is wrongfully accused of murder, she knows her fate likely lies with a noose unless she can disappear. Fleeing with a bounty on her head, she escapes with her maid to the uncharted territories of Colorado to build a new life with a new name. Although the story of the murderess in New York is common gossip, Catherine’s false identity serves her well as she fills in as a temporary army doctor. But in a land unknown, so large and yet so small, a female doctor can only hide for so long.
Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
LITERARY FICTION
Yvonne Georgina Puig
Henry Holt
Hardcover, 978-1-627-79555-5 (also available as an ebook, an audio book, and on Audible), 320 pgs., $27.00
August 2, 2016
Yvonne Georgina Puig has created a comedy of manners about a group of thirtysomethings navigating friendship, love, and their fledgling careers among Houston’s high-powered, oil-money elite.
Thirty-year-old Vivienne Cally is wealthy in name only. Orphaned as a child and raised by a cold but regal aunt, Vivienne was taught to rely on her beauty and Texas tradition, and is expected to marry a wealthy and respectable man who will honor the Cally name. Friends with Houston’s richest and most prominent families, she’s a beloved fixture at the social events big and small, and suffers no shortage of access to some of the city’s most eligible bachelors. Preston Duffin has known Vivienne and her set since childhood. He’s never shared their social aspirations or their status but is liked and respected for his sharp wit and intelligence. About to graduate from a prestigious architecture program, he is both fascinated and repelled by this group of friends he sits on the cusp of. He’s long admired Vivienne’s beauty and grace, but isn’t sure he holds any place in such a traditional life. Intrigued by Preston’s ambitions and the extent to which he challenges the only way of life she’s ever known, Vivienne both courts PrestonÆs attention, and rebuffs his critiques of her predictable and antiquated priorities and values. Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
POLITICAL FICTION/GAY FICTION
Christopher Kelly
Lethe Press
Paperback, 978-1-59021-613-2 (also available as an ebook), 276 pgs., $20.00
May 18, 2016
A month before Election Day, the Democratic nominee for United States Senate in Texas — a gay reality television star named Patrick Francis Monaghan — takes to the stage to deliver a speech. Before the candidate can begin, he is shot twice in the stomach. As doctors work to save him, the reader is taken on a touching journey through the preceding forty years of Patrick’s life. Through a tight and appealing cast of characters, we see Patrick navigate what it is to be a gay man — and a public figure — in our rapidly changing world.
Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
HISTORICAL FICTION
Paulette Jiles
William Morrow
Hardcover, 978-0-06240-920-1 (also available as an ebook, audio book, and on Audible), 224 pgs., $22.99
October 4, 2016
Paulette Jiles was National Book Award Finalist for this work of fiction.
It is 1870 and Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence.
In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna’s parents and sister; sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own. Recently rescued by the U.S. army, the ten-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows. Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous. News of the World is a work of historical fiction that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust. Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
Read our Lone Star Listens interview with author Paulette Jiles here.
TEXAS HISTORICAL FICTION / SUSPENSE
James Lee Burke
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover, 978-1-501-10720-7 (also available as an ebook, an audio book, and on Audible), 288 pgs., $27.99
August 30, 2016
From New York Times bestselling author James Lee Burke—an atmospheric, coming-of-age story set in 1952 Texas, as the Korea War rages.
On its surface, life in Houston is as you would expect: drive-in restaurants, souped-up cars, jukeboxes, teenagers discovering their sexuality. But beneath the glitz and superficial normalcy, a class war has begun, and it is nothing like the conventional portrayal of the decade. Against this backdrop Aaron Holland Broussard discovers the poignancy of first love and a world of violence he did not know existed.
When Aaron spots the beautiful and gifted Valerie Epstein fighting with her boyfriend, Grady Harrelson, at a Galveston drive-in, he inadvertently challenges the power of the Mob and one of the richest families in Texas. He also discovers he must find the courage his father had found as an American soldier in the Great War. Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
Read our Lone Star Listens interview with author James Lee Burke here.
YA FICTION
Jonah Lisa Dyer and Stephen Dyer
The Season
Viking
Hardcover, 978-0-451-47634-0 (also available as an ebook, audio book, and on Audible), 352 pgs., $17.99
July 12, 2016
Megan McKnight is a soccer star with Olympic dreams, a history major, an expert at the three Rs of Texas (readin’, ridin’, and ropin’), and she’s not a girly girl. So when her Southern belle mother secretly enters her as a debutante for the year’s deb season in their hometown of Dallas, she’s furious—and has no idea what she’s in for.
Megan’s attitude gets her on probation with the mother hen of the debs, and she has only a month to prove she can ballroom dance, display impeccable manners, and curtsey like a proper Texas lady or she’ll get the boot and disgrace her family. The perk of being a debutante, of course, is going to parties, and it’s at one of these lavish affairs where Megan gets swept off her feet by the debonair and down-to-earth Hank Waterhouse. This fun modern take on Pride and Prejudice was written by the husband and wife author team of Jonah Lisa and Stephen Dyer. Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
Read our Lone Star Listens interview with authors Jonah Lisa Dyer and Stephen Dyer here.
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