Joe Samuel Starnes’s new novel Fall Line rang in the new year with an honor from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The newspaper included Fall Line among their “best books of the South” list for 2012.

Fall Line, based on a true story, follows the residents of a rural Georgia town as they deal with the flooding of their town by a man-made government dam.

“[In Fall Line], Starnes rips the lid off dirty Georgia politics, skewers the haves and honors the have-nothings who pushed back when a manmade lake came along to drown their communities for electricity and big profits,” writes Gina Webb for the Journal-Constitution. “Nothing says Southern like a bunch of corrupt good ol’ boys sitting around a table gambling away the lives of poor people.”

The October 2012 volume of Studies in American Culture also reviewed Fall Line. Jean Cash of James Madison University praised Fall Line as “a novel worthy of attention, providing real insight into how the power of money and government contributed to the loss of the agrarian South. … Starnes knows his home are and its people and how write about them with admirable authority and poetic understanding.”

In the article “Southern books offer varying points of view,” Todd South of the Chattanooga Times Free Press recommended Fall Line as well, writing that “the cast of characters are rich with color both in word and deed [and] he prose reads smooth and clean but still serves up layers of texture in scene and style.”

Fall Line is available in hardcover and ebook from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution praises Fall Line by Joe Samuel Starnes, recently published by NewSouth Books, as “a quiet dazzler of a new novel” in a review to appear in the Sunday, March 4 issue. The review describes the story about the creation of a man-made dam and the destruction of a rural community as “a love letter to every rural hamlet that has disappeared when the good of the many outweighed the good of the few.” The novel is also favorably compared to the works of legendary Southern authors:

Of all the contemporary Southern novels today that draw comparisons to Faulkner and O’Connor, Starnes’s tale may be one of the few that deserves them. The unsentimental but glorious world seen through the eyes of a “half mutt half chow” fearful of man and guns is pure Faulkner. Elmer, condemning the bigwigs around him for “their fondness for impure women and liquor and money and the love of their own images reflected in shiny glass” echoes the righteous, scathing hatred of Hazel Motes (Wise Blood).

Atlanta Magazine’s Teresa Weaver also praised Fall Line, calling it an “affectionate, eloquent story of loss and survival” in the February 2 issue.

Author Starnes has been busy with interviews, speaking recently to Rowan University Radio and Tennis.com. Starnes described the gestation of his novel, which develop from an idea he conceived in 1989 when reporting on earthquake tremors associated with a large man-made lake in Milledgeville, Georgia. Starnes recounted this story at a reading from Fall Line at the Wolfgram Memorial Library at the main campus of Widener University on January 26.

Starnes will next be in Georgia on Friday, April 27, when he will read from Fall Line at the Old Governor’s Mansion in Milledgeville at 6:00 pm.

Fall Line is also featured on goodreads.com and was included on Deep South magazine’s fall/winter reading list.

The trailer for Fall Line is also available on YouTube.

Fall Line is available in print and all ebook formats from Amazon.com, NewSouth Books, or your favorite bookstore.