Following the national success of Ella Minnow Pea (MacAdam/Cage Fall 2001), this second novel from Mark Dunn brings the same charm and love of good language to a small town in the South.

Welcome to Higby follows the hilarious goings-on in a small town in northern Mississippi over Labor Day weekend. The weaving of narratives brings us Stewie Kipp and Marci Luck, whose love for one another has grown stale as Stewie’s faith becomes impertinent; Carmen Valentine and Euless Ludlam, whose shared debilitating shyness threatens to derail a relationship that has hardly gotten started; the Reverend Oren Cullen, a widower who struggles to renew ties to his emotionally distant son Clint in the midst of lingering grief and a midlife crisis; Tula Gilmurray, whose love for her brother Hank can’t heal her worry over his fading mind; and Talitha Leigh whose thirst for adventure delivers her into the hands of a vegan cult that ignores her protestations, but tries to calm her with hearty legumes.

Welcome to Higby is a Southern-comical tale about simple dreams both realized and thwarted by all the complexities of the human heart.

About Mark Dunn

Mark Dunn is the author of Ella Minnow Pea, Welcome to Higby, and Ibid published by MacAdam/Cage, and co-author with his wife, Mary, of United States Counties, a one-volume compendium of information on U.S. counties, published by McFarland & Company, Inc. He has also written twenty-five full-length plays, nine published in acting edition by Samuel French, Inc., Dramatists Play Service, and Dramatic Publishing Company. His work has been produced throughout the United States and Canada and in Hong Kong, Great Britain, and the Netherlands.

Dunn has received several awards for his work. His novel Ella Minnow Pea won the Borders Original Voices Book of the Year for fiction, was short-listed for Booksense Book of the Year, and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick.

Mark and Mary Dunn are among the founding board members of PULA: People United for Libraries in Africa, an organization devoted to building libraries throughout Africa.

Originally from Memphis, he now makes his home in New Mexico.