Three Debut Novels Forthcoming From Hub City Press in 2018

Hub City Press has announced the forthcoming publication of three novels in 2018.

In early spring, Hub City will release Leesa Cross-Smith’s debut novel Whiskey and Ribbons, set over the course of one snowed-in weekend, where a fallen police officer’s widow and his best friend must confront the feelings they have for each other after his death. In the vein of Jojo Moyes’ After You, Whiskey and Ribbons explores the life that continues beyond loss, with a complicated and yet vital brotherly dynamic reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout’s The Burgess Boys. It’s a meditation on grief, hope, motherhood, brotherhood and surrogate fatherhood, and a requiem for marriage, friendship and family. Above all, it’s a novel about what it means – and whether it’s possible – to heal.

A PEN Open Book Award Nominee, Cross-Smith has been a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and Iowa Short Fiction Award. She is the author of the short story collection Every Kiss a War (Mojave River, 2014) and lives in Louisville, Ky.

The novel was sold by Kerry D’Agostino at Curtis Brown, Ltd.

In late spring, Hub City will release Thomas McConnell’s as-yet-untitled debut novel. In McConnell’s novel, set in German-occupied Czechoslovakia in the 1940s, Vicktor Trn’s life is slowly stripped away as creeping authoritarianism envelopes his city and his family. In the end, this quiet history professor and man of contemplative pacifism finds himself caught between two titanic armies—the Nazis and the Soviets—and must decide how to save all that he loves. This heart-pounding World War II story, infused with the tension of Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale, and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, asks what is a peaceful man to do when totalitarianism takes everything he holds dear.

McConnell’s collection of stories, A Picture Book of Hell and Other Landscapes (Texas Tech University Press, 2005) was nominated for the PEN/Bingham Award and the John Gardner Award for Short Fiction. Educated at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and at the University of Georgia, he is professor of English at the University of South Carolina Upstate in Spartanburg. A Fulbright Scholar in the Czech Republic for 2005-2006, he taught American literature and creative writing at Masaryk University.