It's publication day for CIPHER: DECODING MY ANCESTOR'S SCANDALOUS SECRET DIARIES by Jeremy B. Jones!
In the 1800s, Appalachian farmer and rogue William Prestwood kept salacious coded diaries, leaving his descendent, Jeremy Jones, to reflect on his complicated legacy. The diaries offered a ground-level view of a 19th-century man who passed his days recording eclipses and dissecting rabbits and calculating planetary orbits and reading Goethe and sneaking into barn lofts and closets with dozens of lovers. “The reader is left,” the codebreaker who decoded the diaries wrote, “with the lasting impression that here in these pathetic little books is the very essence of Everyman’s life from the cradle to the grave.” But to author Jeremy Jones, this strange farmer was no Everyman. He was his great-great-great-great grandfather.
Cipher reanimates Prestwood, warts and all, following the author’s ancestor as he courts women and hides runaway slaves, as he fathers children with his wife and with an enslaved woman, as he mines for gold and befriends Daniel Boone’s great nephew, and as he rubs shoulders with a young Zebulon Vance and raises sons soon to die on the fields of Gettysburg. With research, Jones fills in the blank spaces of this Everyman’s life. Along the way, Jones begins tracking his own life alongside the fascinating arc of this long-ago forefather, forging an intimate relationship with a man whose own account, in Jones’s expert hand, begins to take on texture, drama, emotional resonance—even as the author uncovers curious and disturbing details about his ancestor. And thus, about his family. About himself.
CIPHER is available from your local indie bookstore and wherever y'all buy books!
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The response to the OUR STATE BOOK CLUB has been enormous. The only complaint has been that readers and book clubs wanted to know selections in advance. In the spirit of the holiday, ask and ye shall receive. Presenting the 2026 selections of the OUR STATE BOOK CLUB!
Happy Indie Bookstore Day.
I stopped by @malapropsbookstore , grabbed books by @gwendolynparadice and Wilma Dykeman.
Some photo shoutouts to just a few of the many amazing independent bookstores that have helped CIPHER find readers this year.
