Join us as we celebrate the release of the new novel,
"A Quiet Table in the Corner" by Savannah author Susan Earl!
Learn more about the author and pick up your signed copy of the new book on October 14 at Studio Books at ARTS Southeast!
“This isnt the Savannah of hokey ghost tours and drunken bachelorette bashes. Rather Susan Earl casts an insider’s eye on the human costs of the city’s unbridled growth through the stories of a group of friends who meet at a downtown coffee shop. “A Quiet Table” is a charming tribute to the friendship that helps them overcome personal loss as well as the rampant development that threatens their way of life, and eventually the coffee shop itself.”
– Herbert Buchsbaum, Former Senior Editor, The New York Times
About the novel
After thirty years of teaching English to reluctant middle schoolers, Bella Mariotti is burned out, her blood pressure is dangerously high, and retirement seems like her only option.
So she does the unthinkable: she risks her savings to open a coffee shop.
At Buzzed, Bella finally stops playing by the rules. She trades her dress-code wardrobe for an edgy hairstyle and a nose ring, comes out as a lesbian, and discovers the freedom of becoming the woman she’s always wanted to be.
Then something unexpected happens.
Her customers become regulars. The regulars become friends. And four very different people begin gathering at the corner table: an artist, a newly widowed retired orthodontist, a chef battling sobriety, and Bella’s estranged father who has suddenly become homeless.
Over coffee and conversation, these unlikely companions become a family—and Buzzed becomes the one place where each of them can belong.
Until gentrification threatens to demolish the coffee shop.
Now the people who found friendship, acceptance, and a second chance at Bella’s corner table must come together to save the place that saved them.
Warm, funny, and deeply human, "A Quiet Table in the Corner" is a feel-good story about late-life reinvention, unlikely friendships, and discovering that sometimes the family you need is the one you find at the table next to you.
About the Author
Born and raised in the Bronx, for the past forty years Susan Earl has lived in Thunderbolt, Georgia, a former fishing and shrimping community fifteen minutes from downtown Savannah.
In the 1970s, she was a member of the Cummington Community of the Arts in the Berkshires, the setting for WE PART TO MEET AGAIN. Later, while an artist-in-residence at the Ossabaw Island Project on a magical, unspoiled island off Savannah's coast, she moved south.
She's taught photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design, worked at the historic Georgia Infirmary, and volunteered as a Writing Fellow for the Deep Center.
Earl is co-author--with Tom Kohler-- of the award-winning, non-fiction, WADDIE WELCOME & THE BELOVED COMMUNITY, and author of WE PART TO MEET AGAIN, and IN THE DARK and HARRINGTON'S WAY, two novels set in Savannah.
