The Huntsville-Madison County Library Foundation (HMCLF) offers several author events each year to bring awareness to the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library. These events are great opportunities for our community to be entertained by, learn from, and engage in meaningful conversation with best-selling authors of every genre. Author events typically consist of a reading or talk by the author, a question & answer period, and end with a book signing.
Some favorite authors from the recent past include Chris Whitaker, Joshilyn Jackson, Tayari Jones, Terah Shelton Harris, and Andy Weir. The Library Foundation loves connecting authors to the great reading community here in Madison County, all while supporting the HMCPL with proceeds from these events.
We are thrilled to welcome Ruta Sepetys to the South Huntsville Public Library to celebrate her new novel, A Fortune of Sand.
About A Fortune of Sand: Detroit, 1927. A city of smoke and ambition, where glittering wealth conceals a graveyard of secrets.
Marjorie Lennox is the youngest daughter of a powerful automotive dynasty, a family known for money, not manners. Artistic, impulsive, and always slightly out of step, Marjorie has long been dismissed by her controlling father and self-absorbed siblings. But when she secretly applies to an exclusive arts program funded by an elusive benefactor, she sees a chance to redefine herself on her own terms.
The building is grand. The participants are gifted. But something…is off.
Doors lock at odd hours. Strange sounds echo through the halls amid whispers that women are disappearing. And the handsome benefactor’s presence—mostly absent, yet somehow everywhere—begins to unnerve her. As Marjorie’s sense of self begins to slip, so does her grip on the truth. What happens to women who don’t fit neatly into a gilded frame?
Set against the crumbling grandeur of 1920s Detroit and inspired by actual, long-buried historical events, A Fortune of Sand is a haunting mosaic of glamour and grift. In a city built on ambition, just how far will a dynasty go to keep their secrets?
About the Author:
Ruta Sepetys (Rūta Šepetys) is an internationally acclaimed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of historical fiction published in over sixty countries and forty languages. Considered a “crossover” novelist, her books are read by both students and adults worldwide. Winner of the Carnegie Medal and honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Ruta is renowned for giving voice to underrepresented history and those who experienced it. Her books have won or been shortlisted for more than fifty book prizes, appear on over forty state reading lists, and are currently in development for film and television.
Purchase tickets here.
We’re thrilled to welcome Kevin Wilson to the South Huntsville Public Library to celebrate the paperback release of Run for the Hills.
Two ticket options are available:
• $10 - Event Ticket Only
• $25 - Event Ticket + a Paperback Copy of Run for the Hills
Tuesday, June 23, 2026, at 6:00 p.m.
Location: South Huntsville Public Library (7901-L Bailey Cove Rd SE, Huntsville, AL 35802)
A book signing will follow the conversation.
About Run for the Hills:
Ever since her dad left them twenty years ago, it’s been just Madeline Hill and her mom on their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. While it’s a bit lonely, she sometimes admits, and a less exciting life than what she imagined for herself, it’s mostly okay. Mostly.
Then one day, Reuben Hill pulls up in a PT Cruiser and informs Madeline that he believes she’s his half-sister. Reuben—left behind by their dad thirty years ago—has hired a detective to track down their father and a string of half-siblings. And he wants Mad to leave her home and join him for the craziest kind of road trip imaginable to find them all.
As Mad and Rube—and eventually the others—share stories of their father, who behaved so differently in each life he created, they begin to question what he was seeking in each new incarnation. Who are they to one another? What kind of man will they find? And how will these new relationships change Mad’s previously solitary life on the farm?
Infused with deadpan wit, zany hijinks, and enormous heart, Run for the Hills is a sibling story like no other—a novel about a family forged under the most unlikely circumstances and united by hope in an unknown future.
About the Author:
Kevin Wilson is the New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including Now Is Not the Time to Panic, Nothing to See Here, and The Family Fang, as well as two story collections. His work has received the Shirley Jackson Award and been selected as a Read with Jenna book club pick. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife and two sons.
Purchase tickets here.
We’re thrilled to welcome Tayari Jones to the North Huntsville Public Library this October to celebrate her new novel, Kin. Because Kin has been released, we’re opening event tickets now so you can secure your seat and start reading right away.
About Kin:
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood, but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that takes her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.
About the Author:
Tayari Jones is the author of four novels, most recently An American Marriage, which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection and also appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list and his year-end roundup. It won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and an NAACP Image Award and has been published in two dozen countries. Jones is the C.H. Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and lives in Atlanta.
Purchase tickets here.
