Where to Start
Men who loved carefully, in places and decades that gave them no room to, and built lives anyway. A slough in south Mississippi. A pasture and a fenceline in Alabama. A stretch of Gulf Coast highway lined with cottages. Some of these books stand alone. Three of them belong to one coast.
The Books
Steven Greene grew up in a small south Mississippi town, beside a boy named Austal Moorer, and across the whole long reach of his life, he never stopped loving him. Now, looking back, he sets the story down without flinching: the slough, the keeping, the distance, the cost of a love held close for sixty years. A quiet, devastating novel about memory, belonging, and the lives we carry inside us.
Marsh Meriwether met Sumpter Hiott across a crowded fraternity house on an Iron Bowl weekend in 1995, and spent the next thirty years building a life with him (a country veterinary practice, a horse farm raised out of a wrecked and starving place in rural Alabama, a home) against everything the law, the church, and two families had arrayed against them. A tender, plainspoken novel about the home you build when no one will deed you one.
Troy Hammersmith returns to his late father's house on the Florida panhandle carrying a discipline of concealment he has perfected over a career he cannot talk about. What he does not expect, in a season meant for grief, is Casey, and the slow, deliberate making of a love that has to live in code.
Book 1 | Ebb Tide series
A year into the life Troy and Casey have built in secret, the world begins to press in, the law they serve under, a half-packed bag, a sister's unraveling marriage, the question of a child, and a mentor's unsaid years running short of time. Landfall is the story of what a made life has to weather.
Book 2 | Ebb Tide series
A Lieutenant Colonel on Florida's Gulf Coast has spent twenty years building a life inside Don't Ask, Don't Tell, a son, a partner at the same base, a fluency in concealment. Then the repeal arrives. The third and final Ebb Tide novel is about what men do with a freedom they spent two decades learning to live without.
Book 3 | Ebb Tide series
In the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, where the water is neither fresh nor salt but brackish, three families share a fish camp by the month, summer after summer. Brackish is the spare, elegiac story of a man who spent his life sixty yards from what he wanted and never crossed to it, and of the long, quiet reckoning that, after many years, finally brings him to his feet.
On Alabama's Eastern Shore, where old families keep their seats and their silences, three inseparable friends, Theo, Win, and Gray, have spent their whole lives being groomed to carry a name forward. Told across the single day of Theo's high-school graduation, Jubilee is a warm, luminous coming-of-age about first love, the weight of legacy, and the night the water gives up what it has been holding.
In 1990, Clyde Causey is twenty-five, working the night desk at a hotel in Natchez, Mississippi, and renting a room. Then a lawyer tells him that Roberta Dunbar, a distant relative who sent one Christmas card a year and little else, has left him her house on the bluff and everything in it. He has no idea why. What follows is thirty years of a life built around fine things: a trade, a reputation, a house full of objects whose histories he can recite to the inch, and four men he could not hold on to.
"He named the city for the Regent. He named the forts for the King. He kept for himself nothing."
In the last years of his life, a French Marine clerk sets down the private account he never filed: the record of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, founder of Louisiana, and of a love he carried for him across forty years and never once spoke aloud. A quiet, devastating novel of the American South's oldest silences.
August "Gus" Calder left coastal Georgia the first chance he had. When his father dies and leaves him twenty-two thousand acres on the Altamaha, a single clause in the will turns the easy sale into a trap. To leave, he has to stay. A luminous novel of inheritance, the working South, and the loves we are never given the words for.
Connected Stories
The Series & Linked Books
Several of Cade's novels share places, years and the occasional character. The Ebb Tide Trilogy is meant to be read in order: Still Waters, Landfall, then Slack Water. Every other book stands on its own.
The Ebb Tide Trilogy
- Still Waters
- Landfall
- Slack Water
Standalone Connections
Jubilee lives in a loosely connected universe with Win, Grey and Theo, along with recurring minor characters, all linked to Alabama's Eastern Shore.
Book clubs. If you're reading this, I'm happy to share more details about my writings. Just ask - send me a message.
Prefer email? cade@cademorrow.com
I don't read unpublished manuscripts, and I can't offer feedback on work in progress.
NEW IN PRINT
Sourwood Is Here
A Novel of the Georgia Coast
Gus Calder built a career liquidating other people's land. Now his father is dead, and twenty-two thousand acres of coastal Georgia have been left to him in trust: a gift he does not know how to hold, in a town he thought he'd escaped, beside the honey family whose son he can't decide whether to fight or love.
Read the opening chapter, then keep going on Amazon in paperback.
