Man in the Blue Moon
“He’s a gambler at best, a con artist at worst,” her aunt had said of the handlebar-mustached man who snatched Ella Wallace away from her dreams of studying art in France. Eighteen years later, that man has disappeared, leaving Ella alone and struggling to support her three sons.
While the world is embroiled in World War I, Ella fights her own personal battle to keep the mystical Florida land that has been in her family for generations from the hands of an unscrupulous banker. When a mysterious man arrives at Ella’s door in an unconventional way, he convinces her that he can help her avoid foreclosure, and a tenuous trust begins.
But as the fight for Ella’s land intensifies, it becomes evident that things are not as they appear. Hypocrisy and murder soon shake the coastal town of Apalachicola and jeopardize Ella’s family.
A fifth-generation native of Perry, Florida, Michael Morris knows Southern culture and characters. They are the foundation and inspiration for the stories and novels he writes.
Michael started his career as a pharmaceutical sales representative and began writing in the evenings. The first screenplay he penned is still someplace in the bottom of a desk drawer.
While studying under author Tim McLaurin, Michael started the story that would eventually become his first novel, A Place Called Wiregrass. The debut book won the Christy Award for Best First Novel.
Michael’s second novel, Slow Way Home, was compared to the work of Harper Lee and Flannery O’Connor by the Washington Post. It was nationally ranked as one of the top three recommended books by the American Booksellers Association and named one of the best novels of the year by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Michael is also the author of a novella based on the Grammy-nominated song “Live Like You Were Dying,” which became a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. His essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. In addition, his short stories can be found in Sonny Brewer’s Stories from the Blue Moon Café II and in Not Safe, but Good II, an anthology edited by Bret Lott.
A graduate of Auburn University, Michael also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University. He lives in Alabama with his wife, Melanie.
Hardcover, 319 pages
Published September 2012 by Tyndale House Publishers
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