Beautiful Dreamers by Minrose Gwin

Now Available!

Beautiful Dreamers, Minrose Gwin's fourth novel, has just been published by Hub City Press!

Reviews for Beautiful Dreamers

It's 1953 when ten-year-old Memory Feather and her mother, Virginia, abandon their hand-to-mouth existence in the squalid El Camino Motel Lodge in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and are welcomed home to the Mississippi Gulf Coast community of Belle Cote by Virginia's childhood friend Mac, whose verve and energy buoy the "sad and mad and lately divorced" Virginia to embrace this new chapter. Memory is an unusual child with a quiet but fierce intelligence. Attuned to the musings of animals and plants, her ears, she says, are "set at a different pitch," while two fingers missing from her twisted left hand since birth provide a visual marker of the ways she is unlike her peers. Mac, too, has faced challenges. While his wealth, brains, and good humor have allowed him to carve out a niche in Belle Cote, his position as a gay man and his work in the Civil Rights Movement expose him to censure, harassment, and even brutality.

When Tony Amato arrives in Belle Cote, he sets in motion a series of events that will forever change Mem's life and those of the people around her. As Memory, now an adult who has become a biologist who studies the wading birds of the Mississippi Sound that comforted her years ago, recounts the story of the mark he left on her teenage years, she must also confront her own role in the disastrous events of that final summer.

"I'm delighted to release my fourth novel, Beautiful Dreamers, with Hub City Press," says Minrose. "I've always been fascinated by how place and history shape us into who we are and who we may become in what Eudora Welty called 'the crossroads of circumstance.' I feel fortunate indeed that I will be taking this journey with the extraordinary Hub City editors and staff."

Minrose Gwin is the award-winning author of the novels The Queen of Palmyra, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; Promise, which was shortlisted for the Willie Morris Award in Southern Literature; and The Accidentals, which received the 2020 Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Award in Fiction. She has also published a memoir, Wishing for Snow, about the collision of poetry and psychosis in her mother's life, and four books of literary and cultural criticism, most recently Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement. She was co-editor of The Literature of the American South, a Norton anthology, and The Southern Literary Journal.

Like the characters in her novels, Minrose Gwin is a native of Mississippi. She began her writing career as a journalist and later taught at universities across the country, most recently the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her partner, Ruth Salvaggio, and several unruly four-leggeds.

Preorder Beautiful Dreamers from your local independent bookstore or Hub City Press, and also from:
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Excerpts from Reviews for Beautiful Dreamers

“Immersive . . . [infused] with profound insight.” –Leah Tyler, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 “Beautiful Dreamers is a haunting historical novel whose memorable heroine further illuminates a troubled period in the South.” –Paula Martinac, Foreword

“With luscious prose, sharply drawn characters, and a dash of magical realism, Gwin’s atmospheric novel confronts both prejudice and the price we pay for protecting our loved ones.” –Bridget Thoreson, Booklist

“Belle Cote and its Gulf of Mexico locale are richly evoked, as is New Orleans, and [Minrose Gwin] handles suspense deftly. Memory’s witty voice moves convincingly between a child’s innocence and a teenager’s dawning awareness–sometimes exhilarating, sometimes terrifying–of adulthood. [A] compelling story of love, betrayal, and identity.” –Kirkus Reviews

“A writer's writer, Gwin's career is the sort other writers recognize that attention must be paid.”–Parade

“With Beautiful Dreamers, Minrose Gwin firmly establishes herself among the masters of Southern literature. I treasured the experience of reading this heartbreaking yet perfectly crafted tale, with sensitively wrought characters straight out of a Tennessee Williams play and a picturesque Mississippi setting to boot.”–Emily Liner, Southern Booksellers Review

“Beautiful Dreamers is a haunting historical novel whose memorable heroine further illuminates a troubled period in the South.” –Paula Martinac, Foreword Reviews

“Beautiful Dreamers is a delightful yet melancholy read, a deceptively ordinary story that nonetheless leaps off the page and lingers when it’s over. Gwin invites readers to immerse themselves in the tantalizing meridional world of Belle Cote and witness a young girl’s journey toward adulthood – a journey as enchanting as it is bittersweet.”–Imani Nyame, Washington Independent Review of Books

“Minrose Gwin’s bewitching novel, Beautiful Dreamers, covers a lot of ground: lost innocence and found strength, the gifts life takes away and the gifts it gives in return, the lies that hold you back and the lies you run toward. But most of all, it’s about a mother and a daughter and the connection that never lets you go. The adult Memory’s wonderful narrative voice, as she looks back on the events of her life in Belle Cote,(Mississippi), includes Gwin’s exquisitely lyrical descriptions and perfectly apt metaphors, painting an atmosphere that is both open to the endless sea and sky and simultaneously claustrophobic in its damp heat, dark foreboding, and threat of sudden violence. ‘Some stories walk right off the page,’ Gwin writes. ‘They meander down a dark street like drunken men. At the water’s edge, they take off their clothes and fold them carefully. Then they walk into the water, wading out onto the long shelf as dawn breaks. When the shelf gives way, they begin to swim. Should you be walking along the shore, you can see them bobbing out there, riding the swells. You shade your eyes and watch as they disappear into the smear between land and sea. Then all you have is a pile of old clothes and memory.’ And Memory.” –Tina Chambers, Chapter 16, Memphis Commercial Appeal, Knoxville News-Sentinel