October 16, 2024
New York Times bestselling author Attica Locke (Bluebird, Bluebird) visited The Center for Fiction to celebrate the release of her new novel, Guide Me Home, the stunning culmination of her award-winning Highway 59 trilogy.
Set three years after the events of Heaven, My Home, Guide Me Home finds Texas Ranger Detective Darren Mathews being pulled out of early retirement to investigate the case of a missing Black college student who has pledged an all-white sorority. Matthews reckons with his life’s purpose as he chooses between personal peace and the higher call to do good in a town that will stop at nothing to keep its secrets hidden.
Locke was joined by Gabriel Bump (Everywhere You Don’t Belong) to discuss how their respective novels bend traditional genre conventions and the art of imbuing fiction with social commentary and political themes.
Featured Book
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Guide Me Home
By Attica Locke
Published by Little, Brown and Company
Texas Ranger Darren Mathews isn’t sure he’s been a good cop, but believes he’s got a shot at being a good man—if he manages to dodge the potential indictment hanging over his head and if he, from here on out, pledges allegiance to the truth. It’s a virtue the country appears to have wholly lost its grip on, but one Darren sees as his salvation. He is in the midst of remaking his life with the woman he loves, hoping for the peace of country living at his beloved farmhouse, when he is visited by someone who couldn’t hold the truth on her tongue if it was dipped in sugar, a woman who’s always been bent of tearing his life apart. His mother. Armed with a tall tale about a missing Black college student, Sera (whose white sorority sisters insist she isn’t missing at all). Darren must decide if his can trust his mother is telling the truth—and what her ulterior motive may be, and what if that motive has to do with a grand jury deciding his fate.
Darren gets his hooks into the investigation, along the way discovering things about Sera’s family and her hometown that are odd at best, vaguely sinister at worst. Hamstrung by local law enforcement and the Texas Rangers who likewise doubt the account of a missing girl, if Darren wants answers, he’ll need help from the person whom he swore to never trust again—his mother.
In this emotionally stirring conclusion to the singular Highway 59 series, set three years after the events of Heaven, My Home, Darren reckons with his life’s purpose as he’s forced to choose between his own peace and the higher call to do good.
In Conversation
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Attica Locke
Attica Locke
Attica Locke is a New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including Bluebird, Bluebird, which won the Edgar Award for Best Novel. She is also a winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and she has been short listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and nominated for an LA Times Book Prize and an NAACP Image award for her work as a novelist. Locke is also a screenwriter and TV producer, with credits that include Empire, When They See Us and the Emmy-nominated Little Fires Everywhere, for which she won an NAACP Image award for television writing. She co-created and executive produced an adaptation of her sister Tembi Locke’s memoir From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home for Netflix. A native of Houston, Texas, Attica lives in Los Angeles, California.
Photo Credit: Victoria Will
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Gabriel Bump
Gabriel Bump
Gabriel Bump grew up in South Shore, Chicago. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His debut novel, Everywhere You Don’t Belong, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2020 and has won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Fiction, the Heartland Booksellers Award for Fiction, and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s First Novelist Award. Bump teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Photo Credit: Andrew Russell
