When It Gets Cold in the South

Exodus Oktavia Brownlow's stories are set in the imagined town of Honey, Mississippi, and they move through generations of shared history—the town's inhabitants are bound by the food they serve, the hymns they lift into the air, and the thick Southern heat. This place crackles with life: a mother's remedy sizzling on the stove, a gunshot echoing through the woods, a bee humming its way home. Honey is a place where sweetness lingers, where sharpness hides beneath the surface, where people can be tender, sticky, and cruel all at once.

When It Gets Cold in the South stretches across centuries—from the 1600s to today—following characters who balance inherited wisdom with their own visions for the future. From a mother and young daughter confronting the veiled racism of beauty pageants, to a royal family caught between reigning supreme and total extinction, to siblings united by their love of Michael Jackson's Thriller, to cowboys captured by kudzu's clutches and a predator's prowls, these stories reveal a South that is both tender and fierce.

By employing inventive structures, rhythmic dialogue, and richly sensory prose, Brownlow conjures a world alive with sound and texture—where you hear oil pop, feel the sky's cold settle in your core, and carry the South's heat and chill in your bones. Bold, vulnerable, and unforgettable, When It Gets Cold in the South marks the arrival of an extraordinary storyteller.