Order copies of ETIQUETTE FOR RUNAWAYS or IN ALL GOOD FAITH here:
New Year, new adventure. Wishing you all health and happiness in 2023.
In two weeks, I’m heading out. I’ll fly to Manchester, England and stay a week at the Arvon Writers Center in West Yorkshire, at the former home of the poet Ted Hughes. It’s called Lumb Bank and the photos look like a Jane Austen movie: rolling hills and gray stone with vines.
From there, I’ll travel north to Scotland, for a week at another writers retreat called Moniack Mhor, near Inverness. From what I can see, it looks a little wilder up in the Highlands of Scotland. I’m thinking howling winds and striding over foggy moors. Bring it on, Heathcliff! I’ll end the trip with a few days in Edinburgh with an old friend who lives near Oxford.
Of course, I’m wondering, what if I’m uninspired to write? Will everything be okay back at home while I’m gone? What to take with me? How weird will it be to share a bathroom with four (or more) strangers?
More to come.
IN ALL GOOD FAITH : DEEP SOUTH MAGAZINE’S SUMMER READING LIST, 2021
SHEREADS.com list of Most Anticipated Historical Fiction of Summer 2021
25 BEST BOOKS OF SUMMER 2021 BY FROLIC MEDIA
A sweeping Jazz Age tale of regret, ambition,
and redemption inspired by true events, including the Great Moonshine Conspiracy Trial of 1935 and Josephine Baker’s 1925 Paris debut in Le Revue Nègre.
LISTED IN PARADE MAGAZINE’S 30 BEST BEACH READS OF 2020
One of Frolic’s 20 Best Books of Summer 2020.
Fifty Plus Today’s August Book Pick
To see the August 20 Zoom Book Launch Event with Francine Mathews, Click HERE.
To hear the WCBS New York Author Talks interview with Lisa Tschernokowitsch, click HERE.
Both titles from Blackstone Publishing.
Click on the Icons below to buy.
If you order from NEW DOMINION BOOKSHOP in Charlottesville, Va. Message me and I’ll be happy to sign your copy or mail you a signed bookplate.
Praise for ETIQUETTE FOR RUNAWAYS:
“Fasten your seatbelts, for Etiquette for Runaways is an effervescent and completely unpredictable ride from Virginia to New York to Paris with brave and complicated May Marshall. Trust me, this is one fabulous book that will keep you turning pages.”—Nancy Thayer, best-selling author of Girls of Summer
“This is a great coming of age novel about life lessons, loyalty, and forgiveness in a fast-spinning, glittering world full of temptation and opportunity. Beautifully done!”— Kathleen Grissom, bestselling author of THE KITCHEN HOUSE and GLORY OVER EVERYTHING
“Assured, exotic, heart wrenching, Liza Nash Taylor’s ETIQUETTE FOR RUNAWAYS is that rare debut novel that combines a story that sweeps from continent to continent and age to age without sacrificing the deeply personal story of one tormented woman. Taylor’s May Marshall is the new woman of a previous century, a jazz dolly with a scarred past and a hungry heart who wants forgiveness from the only one who cannot give it — herself.” —Jacquelyn Mitchard, New York Times #1 bestselling author of THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN
ABOUT THE STORY
1924. May Marshall is determined to spend the dog days of summer in self-imposed exile at her father’s farm in Keswick, Virginia. Following a naive dalliance that led to heartbreak and her expulsion from Mary Baldwin College, May returns home with a shameful secret only to find her father’s orchard is now the site of a lucrative moonshining enterprise. Despite warnings from the one man she trusts—her childhood friend Byrd—she joins her father’s illegal business. When authorities close in and her father, Henry, is arrested, May goes on the run.
May arrives in New York City, determined to reinvent herself as May Valentine and succeed on her own terms, following her mother’s footsteps as a costume designer. The Jazz Age city glitters with both opportunity and the darker temptations of cocaine and nightlife. From a start mending sheets at the famed Biltmore Hotel, May falls into a position designing costumes for a newly formed troupe of African American entertainers bound for Paris. Reveling in her good fortune, May will do anything for the chance to go abroad, and the lines between right and wrong begin to blur. When Byrd shows up in New York, intent upon taking May back home, she pushes him, and her past, away.
In Paris, May’s run of luck comes to a screeching halt, spiraling her into darkness as she unravels a painful secret about her past. May must make a choice: surrender to failure and addiction, or face the truth and make amends to those she has wronged. But first, she must find self-forgiveness before she can try to reclaim what her heart craves most.
Liza Nash Taylor was a 2018 Hawthornden International Fellow and received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts the same year. She was the 2016 winner of the San Miguel Writer’s Conference Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine; Deep South, and others. ETIQUETTE FOR RUNAWAYS is her first novel. A second will follow in 2021. A native Virginian, she lives in Keswick with her husband and dogs, in an old farmhouse which serves as a setting for her novels.
liza nash taylor 