Blue Bicycle Books

Join us Sat., Oct. 27, 12 pm for lunch at Halls Signature Events (5 Faber St.), as Patti Callahan discusses Becoming Mrs. Lewis (Thomas Nelson, hb., 416 pp., $26).

Tickets are $32 for the three-course luncheon, or $60 to add a signed copy of the book.

Get tickets here.

At once a fascinating historical novel and a glimpse into a writer’s life, Becoming Mrs. Lewis is above all a love story. When poet and writer Joy Davidman began writing letters to C. S. Lewis—known as Jack—she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Everything about New Yorker Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford don and the beloved writer of Narnia, yet their minds bonded over their letters. Embarking on the adventure of her life, Joy traveled from America to England and back again, facing heartbreak and poverty, discovering friendship and faith, and against all odds, finding a love that even the threat of death couldn’t destroy.

Patti Callahan (Patti Callahan Henry) is a New York Times bestselling author. Patti was a finalist in the Townsend Prize for Fiction, has been an Indie Next Pick, twice an OKRA pick, and a multiple nominee for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Novel of the Year. Patti attended Auburn University for her undergraduate work and Georgia State University for her graduate degree. The mother of three children, she lives in both Mountain Brook, Alabama, and Bluffton, South Carolina, with her husband.

Join us Tue., Oct. 30, 5:00 pm to celebrate the release of Joseph Kelly‘s new book Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin (Bloomsbury Publishing, hb., 512 pp., $32).

In Marooned, Joseph Kelly reexamines the history of Jamestown and comes to a radically different and decidedly American interpretation of these first Virginians. We all know the great American origin story. Fleeing religious persecution, the hardworking, pious Pilgrims thrived in the wilds of New England, where they built their fabled city on a hill. However, the epic origin of America was not an exodus and a fledgling theocracy. It is a tale of shipwrecked castaways of all classes marooned in the wilderness fending for themselves in any way they could–a story that illuminates who we are today.

Joseph Kelly is a professor of literature at the College of Charleston. He is the author of America’s Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March Toward Civil War, and the editor of the Seagull Reader series. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina.

Join us Wed., Oct. 24, 6:00 pm to celebrate the release of Jacqueline Friedland‘s debut novel Trouble the Water (SparkPress, pb., 352 pp. $17).

Set against the vivid backdrop of Charleston twenty years before the Civil War, Trouble the Water is a captivating tale replete with authentic details about Charleston’s aristocratic planter class, American slavery, and the Underground Railroad. Abigail Milton was born into the British middle class, but her family has landed in unthinkable debt. To ease their burdens, Abby’s parents send her to America to live off the charity of their old friend, Douglas Elling. Just as she begins to grow comfortable in her new life, she overhears her benefactor planning the escape of a local slave―and suddenly, everything she thought she knew about Douglas Elling is turned on its head.

Jacqueline Friedland holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a JD from NYU Law School. She practiced as an attorney in New York before returning to school to receive her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in New York with her husband, four children, and a tiny dog.

Join us Mon., Oct. 8, 5:30 pm to celebrate the release of Elin Hilderbrand‘s new novel Winter in Paradise (Little, Brown and Co., hb., 320 pp., $28).

Winter in Paradise has everything that readers have come to know and love about an Elin Hilderbrand novel, plus a healthy dose of intrigue. Irene Steele’s idyllic life is shattered when she is woken up by a late-night phone call. Her beloved husband has been found dead. As Irene investigates the mysterious circumstances of her husband’s death, she is plunged into a web of intrigue and deceit belied by the pristine white sand of the Caribbean beaches of St. John.

Elin Hilderbrand lives on Nantucket with her husband and their three young children. She grew up in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and traveled extensively before settling on Nantucket, which has been the setting for her five previous novels. Hilderbrand is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the graduate fiction workshop at the University of Iowa.

Join us Sat., Sept. 29, 5 pm to celebrate the release of F. Rutledge Hammes’s debut novel A Curious Matter of Men with Wings.

A Curious Matter of Men With Wings tells the story of the Walpole family who fled their sorted past and escaped to one of the nearly 2,000 uninhabited Sea Islands off the Carolina coast. The novel opens with the two Walpole boys taking their little sister out on their johnboat for the first time to pirate the waterways for beer and loose change. In the process, their little sister goes overboard and appears to have drowned, until two men with gigantic wings swoop down and carry her body away into the sky. The news of her disappearance hits the family particularly hard, and the mother goes so far as to fashion herself wings and tries to fly. The Walpole boys set off in search of their little sister and, in the process, discover the truth behind the centuries-old Gullah tale of the Flying Men as well as numerous other mysteries native to the South Carolina Sea Islands.

Hammes himself was born here in the Lowcountry, where he fell in love with the waterways, the people and the folklore that inhabit the Sea Islands. His whole life, he has been writing about the Charleston area and Sea Island culture, and for the past decade, he has been teaching those young writers who will keep our lush storytelling tradition alive. He earned his MFA in fiction from Old Dominion University, has had numerous short stories, essays and poems published in various journals and magazines around the country, and is a contributing writer in several books. He is also the 2019 South Carolina Arts Commission Prose Fellow and is presently Director of the Creative Writing program at Charleston County School of the Arts, the most awarded middle- and high-school writing program in the nation.