Book Your Lunch with Matt Matthews June 29, 2011

Book Your Lunch with Greenville author Matt Matthews on Wednesday, June 29th from 12-2 pm at The Lazy Goat in downtown Greenville. Tickets are $25 each and must be purchased in advance at http://www.bookyourlunch.com or by calling Fiction Addiction at 864-675-0540.

Each Book Your Lunch event includes a 20-minute reading or talk by the author, a Q&A session with the audience, a delicious lunch, and an onsite booksigning session. Books may be purchased from Fiction Addiction at or prior to the event.

Part mystery and part love story, Mercy Creek (Hub City Press, hardcover, $24.95, releases May 1st) is a debut coming-of-age novel by South Carolina First Novel Prize-winner and Greenville pastor, Matt Matthews.

On his first day out of school, 16-year-old Isaac doesn’t feel that events of June in a town on Virginia’s Eastern Shore could threaten his life or even change it. But there are signs. His girlfriend just gave him a geranium for his birthday. His mom, who died the year before, is fading into catch phrases. His dad is romancing a woman Isaac likes but doesn’t want to. And a clutch of self-righteous vigilantes offers a $5,000 reward for the conviction of the felon or felons vandalizing town homes.

Isaac’s summer job is to sweep and straighten the warehouse of the town’s hardware store, Chum’s Hardware. It’s the place where the vigilantes congregate. It’s also where unexplained puzzles swirl like dust motes around co-worker Crazy Eddie, an acerbic 82-year-old.

By the middle of a sultry July, Isaac has discovered that small towns in which everybody knows everybody else’s business often hide the most vicious secrets. By solving mysteries of a twisted communal past, laying bare the stains of a history that includes the Klan, Isaac has resolved where he belongs in the world, opening the future. Included in that future is a new girlfriend who would never give him a potted plant.

In this quietly suspenseful story with splashes of manic humor, the eccentrics, the recluses, the bigots, and the bores join the human parade. The beat of march for that parade, however, is the heart-stirring strain of forgiveness.

About the author:
Matt Matthews was born and raised in sight of water in Hampton, Virginia. He studied journalism at Virginia Commonwealth University, then went to Union Seminary in Richmond. He was the studio manager of a Presbyterian church’s small radio station during those years, played volleyball in the field, studied Rheinhold Neibuhr with fear and trembling, and met a marvelous woman from Texas named Rachel.

A year after Matt and Rachel got married, they moved to Arkansas, where they watched movies, led youth trips, supported the presbytery camp, and welcomed the birth of their first son. After moving to Portsmouth, Virginia, two more sons came along.

Mr. Matthews enjoys writing, playing with his boys, dinner dates and arty movies with his wife, and inventing chords on his six-string. Mercy Creek, winner of the South Carolina Arts Commission First Novel Prize, is his debut novel. He has also written a children’s story about vocation, Fritz and Christine and Their Very Nervous Parents, illustrated by Adrienne Davis. His musical plays hit the boards in Norfolk, Virginia, to enthusiastic response, but he has stalled in the writing of his third play.

Matt has worked at a pickle plant, a boatyard, the Virginia State Capitol, as a chaplain in a hospital and Boy Scout Camp, and as an occasional newspaper columnist. He’s served on boards of a nursing home, campus ministry groups, “The Jeremiah Project”, and has studied Family Systems Theory with Daniel Jungkuntz and Peter Steinke. He’s planned national family and youth conferences for the Presbyterian Church (USA).

For six years, Matt has been pastor/head of staff at St. Giles Presbyterian Church in Greenville, SC. In 2011, he will spend a three month sabbatical writing articles about fathers and sons, his father’s experience as a WWII POW, and the spirituality of men.

Official Website: http://www.bookyourlunch.com