Julia Watts Books

When Bev's lover Andie receives an assistant professorship at a Christian-affiliated college, Bev does her best to be supportive. But she isn't too thrilled about the prospect of moving from Boston's lesbian ghetto to the small southern town of Morgan, Kentucky. Before she and Andie are even unpacked, a nosy neighbor is at the door with a welcoming cake and a basketful of personal questions. Bev is shocked when Andie tells the woman that the two of them are cousins - and mortified when the woman promises to set them up with all the eligible men in town, beginning with her grandson Cricket, the local mortician. Thus begins a hilarious and heartwarming tale of lesbian culture shock, the resiliency of true love, and the maddening gap between coming out and being out.

In rural Kentucky, a sixteen-year-old boy with a love of quilting, cooking and Dolly Parton helps his grandma care for his opioid-addicted mother, until the discovery of a family secret upends everything he has ever believed. While other sixteen-year-old boys in Morgan, Kentucky, love hunting and football, Kody prefers to spend his time quilting with his grandmother ("Nanny"), watching Golden Girls reruns, and listening to old Dolly Parton albums. Nanny is Kody's main caregiver, but it takes both Nanny and Kody to take care of Kody's mother, whose drug problem is spinning out of control. Between looking after Mommy and trying to survive in a place that doesn't look kindly on feminine boys, Kody already has a hard time making sense of his life. But then he uncovers a family secret that will change everything in his life.

In Julia Watt's stunning adult novel, set in1953, two married women struggle to come to terms with their deepening love for each other in a small college town in Kentucky, against a backdrop of racism, sexism, and complete rejection of same-sex liaisons. In 1953 Collinsville, Kentucky, a small college town, colleagues and neighbors of Samuel and Boots are more than willing to accept their married status, even though their official relationship is one of convenience that will never be consummated. Boots, an English professor at Millwood College for Women, has long had clandestine affairs with muscular men, while Samuel dodges questions about her disinterest in motherhood. But when Samuel meets a new professor's wife, Frances, at a faculty party, she soon falls in love, and learns the difficulty of discretion in a town that doesn't accept the idea of two women sleeping together. The tragic consequences of a past once thought long-gone reflect present-day trends in this extraordinary novel of passion in the face of societal intolerance. LAMBDA award-winning author Julia Watts (Needlework, Quiver) returns to adult fiction in this consummate historical work.