Mark Dunn 
Welcome to Higby 

Following the national success of ‘Ella Minnow Pea’, this second novel from Mark Dunn brings the same charm and love of good language to a small town in the South. ‘Welcome to Higby’ follows the hilarious goings-on in a small town in northern Mississippi over Labor Day weekend. The weaving of narratives brings us Stewie Kipp and Marci Luck, whose love for one another has grown stale as Stewie’s faith becomes impertinent; Carmen Valentine and Euless Ludlam, whose shared debilitating shyness threatens to derail a relationship that has hardly gotten started; the Reverend Oren Cullen, a widower who struggles to renew ties to his emotionally distant son Clint in the midst of lingering grief and a midlife crisis; Tula Gilmurray, whose love for her brother Hank can’t heal her worry over his fading mind; and Talitha Leigh whose thirst for adventure delivers her into the hands of a vegan cult that ignores her protestations, but tries to calm her with hearty legumes. ‘Welcome to Higby’ is a Southern-comical tale about simple dreams both realized and thwarted by all the complexities of the human heart.