Minrose Gwin, Beautiful Dreamers

From Minrose Gwin, award-winning author of The Accidentals, comes Beautiful Dreamers, a story of a precocious teen and her mother, their gay best friend, and the con man who unravels their family.

It’s 1953 when Memory Feather and her mother, Virginia, are welcomed back home to the Mississippi Gulf Coast community of Belle Cote by Virginia’s childhood friend Mac McFadden, whose verve and energy buoy the recently divorced Virginia to embrace this new chapter. Memory (“Mem”) is unlike other girls: she is attuned to the voices of plants and animals and is missing two fingers on her twisted left hand. The three of them knit their lives together and become a close, though unconventional, family.
While Mac’s wealth, brains, and good humor have allowed him to carve out a niche in Belle Cote, his position as a gay man active in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement exposes him to censure, harassment, and even brutality. When the unscrupulous and charismatic Tony Amato arrives in Belle Cote as Mac’s “guest,” he sets in motion a series of events that will shatter familial bonds and forever change Mem’s life. Now, an adult Mem recounts the story of the scars Tony left in her teenage years, confronting her culpability in the disastrous events of that final summer.

Sweeping, dramatic, and vividly rendered, Beautiful Dreamers is a novel of innocence and betrayal, love and intolerance, and the care and honesty we owe the families we choose.

MINROSE GWIN is the author of the novels The Queen of Palmyra, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; Promise, which was shortlisted for the Willie Morris Award in Southern Literature; and The Accidentals, which received the 2020 Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Award in Fiction. She has also published a memoir, Wishing for Snow, about the collision of poetry and psychosis in her mother’s life, and four books of literary and cultural criticism, most recently Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement. She was co-editor of The Literature of the American South, a Norton anthology, and The Southern Literary Journal.

Like the characters in her novels, Minrose Gwin is a native of Mississippi. She began her writing career as a journalist and later taught at universities across the country, most recently the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico