2022-2023 Season
Join USCB Center for the Arts for another great season of Lunch with Authors! Meet and dine with a tasty mix of New York Times best-selling authors, award-winning authors, and debut authors.
All luncheons will be held at 12pm at:
Belfair Clubhouse
200 Belfair Oaks Blvd, Bluffton, SC
Lunch will be served at noon and there will be books available for purchase and signing before and after the luncheon. Bon appe-read!
Katherine Reay
About the Book:
Caroline Payne thinks it’s just another day of work until she receives a call from Mat
Hammond, an old college friend and historian. Mat has uncovered a scandalous secret kept buried for decades: In World War II, Caroline’s British great-aunt betrayed family and country to marry her German lover. Determined to find answers and save her family’s reputation, Caroline flies to her family’s ancestral home in London. She and Mat discover diaries and letters that reveal her grandmother and great-aunt were known as the “Waite sisters.” Popular and witty, they came of age during the interwar years, a time of peace and luxury filled with dances, jazz clubs, and romance. The buoyant tone of the correspondence soon yields to sadder revelations as the sisters grow apart, and one leaves home for the glittering fashion scene of Paris, despite rumblings of a coming world war. Each letter brings more questions. Was Caroline’s great-aunt actually a traitor and Nazi collaborator, or is there a more complex truth buried in the past? Together, Caroline and Mat uncover stories of spies and secrets, love and heartbreak, and the events of one fateful evening in 1941 that changed everything.
Karen Grassle
About the Book:
Karen Grassle, the beloved actress who played Ma on Little House on the Prairie, grew up at the edge of the Pacific Ocean in a family where love was plentiful but alcohol wreaked havoc. In this candid memoir, Grassle reveals her journey to succeed as an actress even as she struggles to overcome depression, combat her own dependence on alcohol, and find true love. With humor and hard-won wisdom, Grassle takes readers on an inspiring journey through the political turmoil on ’60s campuses, on to studies with some of the most celebrated artists at the famed London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, and ultimately behind the curtains of Broadway stages and storied Hollywood sets. We know Karen Grassle best as the proud prairie woman Caroline Ingalls, with her quiet strength and devotion to family, but this memoir introduces readers to the complex, funny, rebellious, and soulful woman who, in addition to being the force behind those many strong women she played, fought passionately―as a writer, producer, and activist on behalf of equal rights for women. Raw, emotional, and tender, Bright Lights celebrates and honors womanhood, in all its complexity.
Mary Martha Greene
About the Book:
Some Southern cooks keep their prized family recipes under lock and key, but not Mary Martha Greene. Why? She says few things can truly be kept secret in the South and recipes, like cheese biscuits, are meant to be shared. That’s why she’s the “Cheese Biscuit Queen.”
In The Cheese Biscuit Queen Tells All, Greene, a South Carolinian and former lobbyist, pairs more than one hundred tried-and-true recipes for dishes like country ham scones, Frogmore stew dip, shrimp and corn pie, and lemon pound cake with stories from her corner of the South. The book opens with the famous cheese biscuit recipe (complete with family secrets), and the pages that follow brim with fabulous characters, antic-filled anecdotes, and recipes so good they might just call for a change in State House rules (true story).
There will be two exciting authors on December 16! Enjoy MUCH more than just cookbook authors for both luncheons!
Kevin Mitchell
About the Book:
From the influence of 1920s fashion on asparagus growers to an heirloom watermelon lost and found, Taste the State abounds with surprising stories from South Carolina’s singularly rich food tradition.
Here, Kevin Mitchell and David S. Shields present engaging profiles of eighty-two of
the state’s most distinctive ingredients, such as Carolina Gold rice, Sea Island White Flint corn, and the cone-shaped Charleston Wakefield cabbage, and signature dishes, such as shrimp and grits, chicken bog, okra soup, Frogmore stew, and crab rice. These portraits, illustrated with original photographs and historical drawings, provide origin stories and tales of kitchen creativity and agricultural innovation; historical “receipts” and modern recipes, including Chef Mitchell’s distillation of traditions in Hoppin’ John fritters, okra and crab stew, and more.
There will be two exciting authors on December 16! Enjoy MUCH more than just cookbook authors for both luncheons!
Pamela Terry
About the Book:
One woman fights to hold on to her friends, her family, and all that she holds dear as the battle over a Confederate statue divides her small-town Georgia community in this powerful novel from the author of The Sweet Taste of Muscadines.
On the morning after Harry Cline’s funeral, a rare ice storm hits the town of Wesleyan, Georgia. The community wakes up to find its controversial statue of Confederate general Henry Benning destroyed—and not by the weather. Half the town had wanted to remove the statue; the other half wanted to celebrate it. Now that the matter has been taken out of their hands, the town’s long-simmering tensions are laid bare.
With a cast of poignant, relatable characters, WHEN THE MOON TURNS BLUE is a compassionate and timely novel about family, friendship, and what can happen when we discover that we don’t particularly like the people we love.
Jennifer Coburn
About the Book:
Germany, 1939. The nation is on the brink of war and Hitler’s plan to create a “master race” of pure-blooded Aryan babies has been launched. The top-secret Lebensborn Nazi breeding program is brought to life in Cradles of the Reich, the story of three German women who change the course of one another’s lives.
Jennifer Coburn is the author of Cradles of the Reich, a historical novel about three very different women living at a Nazi Lebensborn breeding home at the start of World War ll.
Deborah Goodrich Royce
About the Book:
When a severed hand washes ashore in the wealthy enclave of Palm Beach, Florida, the lives of two women—a lonely writer obsessed with the unsolved murder of her mother’s best friend, and a panicked wife whose husband has disappeared with their children—collide as the world shutters in the pandemic lockdown of 2020.
A young woman's life seems perfect until her family goes missing. A writer lives alone with her dog and collects arcane murder statistics. What each of them stands to lose as they sneak around the do-not-enter tape blocking Reef Road beach is exposed by the steady tightening of the cincture encircling them. In a nod to the true crime that inspired it, Deborah Goodrich Royce's Reef Road probes unhealed generational scars in a wrenching and original work of fiction. It is both stunning and sexy, like a bystander surprised by a curtain left open, you won’t be able to look away.
Renee Rosen
About the Book:
Her latest, FIFTH AVENUE GLAMOUR GIRL is a story of friendship, glitz, and glamour in 1940s New York where a young woman gets pulled into Estee Lauder’s enigmatic orbit as the future cosmetic icon prepares to take the world by storm. This is for lovers of glamorous 20th-century set novels, feel-good women’s fiction, historical fiction, and fans of Kate Quinn and Fiona Davis.
Author Renee Rosen is a USA Today bestselling author. Her novels include Park Avenue Summer, Windy City Blues, White Collar Girl, What the Lady Wants and Dollface as well as the young adult novel, Every Crooked Pot. She is currently working on a new novel about the cosmetic icon, Estée Lauder coming from Penguin Random House/Berkley in 2023.
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