SAFE HARBOR BOOKS

Welcome! We are a small independent publisher of photography and fiction. We are located in Asheville, North Carolina, and distributed by Pathway Book Service of Keene, New Hampshire. Our publications are available at local bookstores, Amazon, and Pathway Book Service (800-345-6665).

To contact Safe Harbor Books either e-mail us at safeharborbooks@aol.com or write to Safe Harbor Books, 1 Page Avenue, #404, Asheville, NC 28801.

Our interest is work by southern photographers or photographs focusing on the South as well as literary fiction (novels or novellas) by southern authors or narratives set in the South.

We are not interested in genre fiction, mysteries being the exception. Please query before submitting any material. Email preferred.

Photography projects will require financial assistance from the photographer.


	HOW IT WAS by Christopher Brookhouse 190 Pages, $16.95 (paper) ISBN: 978-1-7344995-2-0 (print) ISBN: 978-1-7344516-9-5 (ebook) The year is 1980. Leonard Gray, now in his sixth year at a prestigious Southern college, works various jobs to pay for the remaining class hours he needs to graduate. Hired by the athletic department to tutor a superior Black basketball recruit, Lenny becomes ensnared in conflicting conspiracies - one to use the player's skills for personal and institutional enrichment, the other to preserve the school's predominantly white athletic teams and tradition of academic excellence. BACK TO TOP
	MESSING WITH MEN by Christopher Brookhouse 230 Pages, $16.95 (paper) ISBN: 978-1-7344995-0-6 (print) ISBN: 978-1-7344995-1-3 (ebook) On Rasa Island, Florida, tourist time or off-season, aging Ali Green, Sam Bishop, and Landon Greer meet almost every day at happy hour at Tib’s, a local watering hole. Ali, always looking for a deal, Sam, a successful realtor until his bookkeeper absconded with all of his money, and Landon, a retired English professor, plod on day by day in seemingly innocuous fashion, pleasuring new lovers and wrestling with demons that haunt them…until a dilapidated historic house with secrets puts Ali and Sam at odds while Landon quietly observes the fray. Or does he? BACK TO TOP
	A PINCH OF SALT by Christopher Brookhouse 171 Pages, $15.95 (paper) ISBN: 978-0-9798226-8-1 Gus Salt never wanted to be sheriff of Harr County, North Carolina. He had planned to study with a famous writer at Harvard College and become a writer himself. Then Pearl Harbor happened, and Gus, deferred from service because of a lazy thyroid, was nearly the only able-bodied man available for law enforcement. Now, fourteen years later, a weary Gus is ready to retire. A new man is ready to take over, but first Gus must determine if the drowning of the local Episcopal minister was accidental, and if Blossom Hall, a young woman in love with Gus, had anything to with it. The old woman who appears and disappears, what does she know about Blossom? What does Blossom know about her? The past is about to catch up with everyone, Gus included. BACK TO TOP

	PERCY’S FIELD by Christopher Brookhouse 153 Pages, $15.95 (paper) ISBN: 978-0-9978686-1-6 Blossom, an aspiring novelist, and her visiting editor unearth a finger bone in Percy Levoy’s field . . . and a Civil War-era secret threatens to destroy two of the town’s founding families. When Sheriff Salt is called on to investigate a suspicious fire and the deaths of a photographer and a local politician, he uncovers even more secrets and is faced with the dilemma of whether to reveal what he knows or do some “burying” of his own. BACK TO TOP

	NOLAN’S CROSS by Christopher Brookhouse 175 Pages, $15.95 (paper) ISBN: 978-0-9978686-3-0 When Kitty Wing comes into town to deliver an old safe, she ends up dead. In the trunk of her car, along with the safe, is an envelope in which there’s a hand-drawn crossword puzzle Sheriff Gus Salt believes is a clue to opening the strongbox. The investigation of Kitty’s death takes Gus back to his old stomping grounds in Chapel Hill, where he uncovers the long-kept secret of a decorated WWII veteran whose life ended in suicide. Meanwhile, Blossom, the younger woman with whom Gus shares a conflicted past, returns to her hometown to attend a wedding…and to find out if there’s a possible future for the star-crossed couple. BACK TO TOP

	A MIND OF WINTER by Christopher Brookhouse 182 Pages, $15.95 (paper) ISBN: 978-0-9978686-6-1 In this final installment of the Gus Salt series, the sheriff of Harr County, North Carolina, meets up again with the scofflaw Hunt brothers as he searches for the identity of a burned body and the whereabouts of a missing woman, who seems connected to tragic events far beyond Harr County's borders. It's a cold and gloomy January, no solace for Gus in his own personal winter of discontent. BACK TO TOP

	AFTER: THE SILENCE OF THE LOWER 9^TH WARD Photographs by John Rosenthal Preface by Lolis Eric Elie Afterword by John Pope In the tenth year after Katrina, Safe Harbor Books is honored to publish John Rosenthal’s photographs of the Lower 9^th Ward. About his time there Mr. Rosenthal comments, “What I found and what I photographed wasn’t the remnants of a dangerous and dilapidated neighborhood now demolished by a hurricane, but the vestiges of a working-class community in which aspiration contended with scarcity, and where religious faith found expression on every block. From my perspective, the floodwaters had washed away not only bricks and mortar, but also the toxic stereotypes that separate us from each other. What was left, in other words, was the vanishing common ground, and it is this familiar terrain that I have photographed.” “The power of these photographs is that you feel the human presence and its absence in every frame of Rosenthal’s work” — Lolis Eric Elie, Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans “Rosenthal’s superbly crafted poetic images are the works of a refined aesthetic sensibility which demands that beauty reveal itself in any subject.” — Kate Dobbs Ariail, The Five Points Star “Rosenthal’s photographs chronicle with timeless artistry a landscape ravaged by water and wind. We feel the loss of this vibrant community and bear its sorrow through an eerie brand of pictorial silence This is a beautiful book to be treasured.” — David M. Spear, The Neugents, Visible Spirits, Ten Days in Havana 112 pages, 11.5 inches x 11.75, 46 photographs (color). Published 2015. ISBN: 978-0-9798226-7-4 Sale price $20.00 plus postage. No returns. BACK TO TOP

	SUNNY LAND: Pictures from Paradise Photographs by Michael Carlebach Sunny Land offers a unique view, both realistic and comic, of Miami and south Florida during the last decades of the 20^th century, when political and social turmoil, urban decay, and suburban sprawl made Miami a curious amalgamation of glamour and violence, all of it bathed in sunlight. These black and white images portray a Florida left out of the tourist brochures, a place that is in some respects invisible, though no less compelling and meaningful. Michael Carlebach photographed in south Florida for over three decades. His publications include The Origins of Photojournalism in America; American Photojournalism Comes of Age; Working Stiffs: Occupational Portraits in the Age of Tintypes; and Bain's New York: The City in News Pictures 1900-1925. “Carlebach's work epitomizes the notion that the best documentary photography is also great art photography. The proof of the pudding is how memorable it is.” — Rob Neufeld, Asheville Citizen-Times 60 pages, 12 x 12, 54 b/w photographs Published 2010. ISBN: 978-0-9798226-2-9 Sale price: $20.00 plus postage. No returns. BACK TO TOP

	FINN by Christopher Brookhouse 122 pages, $12.95 (paper) ISBN: 978-0-9798226-5-0 Summer. 1960. Finn grew up in the South. He should have known when the school he worked for admitted a student of color there would be trouble. He should have known not to have an Indian for a friend. He should have known not to get involved with Annabel Spier. But he could not have known what he comes to know: how the secrets of the past shake loose one by one, and what he thought he knew he did not know. “FINN is the real thing—a southern Gothic tale in which the narrator must solve the mystery of his own nature in order to escape the web of violence in which he is caught. Start it when you have time to finish because you won’t want to put it down.” — Terry Roberts, author of A Short Time to Stay Here, winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. “In prose that is as rich and languorous as the summer that serves as the novel’s backdrop, Christopher Brookhouse brings readers a novel that is perfectly crafted, expertly paced, and, most importantly, very, very good.” — Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home and This Dark Road to Mercy. “A layered work, mottled and shifting like visions through antique glass, shadowed by ever lurking violence, as if written by a Southern-born Jim Harrison. A novel to be savored more than once, written with the same languorous, rumbling passion of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward's film The Long Hot Summer.” — Kirkus Reviews BACK TO TOP

	LOVING RYAN by Christopher Brookhouse 200 pages, $10.00 (paper) IBSN: 978-0-9798226-1-2 Christopher Brookhouse is the author of numerous short stories, novellas, novels, and poetry. His early novel Running Out was honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2005, Fog: The Jeffrey Stories (see below) won New Hampshire's biennial fiction award. Three novellas that explore reticence and desire. “Unless Alex” takes place on Valentine's Day years after the narrator has fallen in love with Alexandra (Alex) Kellogg. As the day passes, the narrator unfolds the story of their lives, from the autumn when Alex first kissed him and the summer when he turned away from the invitation of her nakedness to the years they have lived separate but connected lives. At the end of the evening, when Alex offers another invitation, the narrator knows that if he accepts he may lose her forever. In “Affliction” reticence gives way to desire: Tony for Meredith, daughter of wealthy, self-absorbed Talbot Breed; Talbot for Janet, a painter whose art depicts the present but predicts the future; Crystal, one of Janet's subjects, for Janet; and Dr. Abernathy, a retired physician, for Meredith. As one might expect in a story suggested by Gabriel García Márquez's Of Love and Other Demons, there exists a sensuous psychological and tactile realism, mystery inspired by beauty. “Loving Ryan” is a story of crime and spying told through the perspectives of several participants: Ryan, an American hired by the president of a Caribbean island nation to tutor his daughter, Isabel. Yvonne, Ryan's mother; Hugo, Isabel's father; Julia Katia, Hugo's wife; Chloe, Julia Katia's ally in forcing Hugo into exile; and the charming and precocious Isabel, who falls in love with Ryan. In exile, Ryan, the reticent tutor, becomes Hugo's devoted companion and caretaker. “What makes [these stories] unusual is how erotically charged they are, although the central male character always holds back. Somehow that increases the charge. I don't believe I've ever read anything quite like them. Bravo!” — Joan Joffee Hall, author of In Angled Light, and other collections “Reading these stories was a most gratifying experience.” — Jerry Leath Mils, author of “The Dead Mule Rides Again,” and other pieces. BACK TO TOP
A few of these books remain. Contact Safe Harbor for availability.
	Shell Castle: Portrait of a North Carolina House Photographs by Elizabeth Matheson Afterword by Catherine Bishir “I never photograph anything I don't think is beautiful. Shell Castle is the most soulfully beautiful place I've ever seen.” —E.M. Shell Castle, a late eighteenth-century plantation house in Halifax County, North Carolina, remained in the same family for two centuries. This book documents the plantation during the final days of Charles Whitaker, the last member of the family who built it. Additional photographs evidence the harm done by new owners. The text and photographs are complemented by Catherine Bishir's essay, which places Shell Castle and its inhabitants in their social and historical context. Elizabeth Matheson is a native of Hillsborough, North Carolina. Her elegant photographs have been widely exhibited. In 2004 she received the North Carolina award for Excellence in the Arts. 72 pages, 101/2 x 11, 44 photographs (25 duotones, 19 color) Published 2008. BACK TO TOP

	QUARTET: Four North Carolina Photographers Introduction by Georgann Eubanks Quartet presents a sampling of the work of Rob Amberg, Elizabeth Matheson, John Rosenthal, and Caroline Vaughan. Their images, for the most part made in North Carolina, are both quiet and passionate, in time and outside of time, revealing both surface and depth. Mr. Amberg documents life in rural southern communities. Ms. Vaugha's landscapes and portraits detail the increments and textures of time. Ms. Matheson's pictures present the architecture of formality that expresses the character of those who built and lived in such places as well as what is past and passing. Mr. Rosenthal's photographs freeze ordinary moments thereby allowing us to see in them what is extraordinary and permanent. 72 pages, 12 x 12, 34 photographs (29 duotones, 5 color) Pub. 2005. BACK TO TOP

	OPENING SCENES Photographs by Norman Seider Judged BEST BOOK, 23^rd Lopresti Art Publication Awards, 2007 “I think of my photographs as cinematic. I am a filmmaker creating silent movies in single frames. I see movement in each frame, a story ready to unfold, or the ghost of a moment just passed.” —Norman Seider “Norman Seider's work has a European and American sensibility. There are stories and ghosts with each image. His light is mysterious.” —Jean Claude Lemagny, Director of Department of Photography, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris “This is a book you take out to savor. The printing . . . of the book is stunning.” —Tom Abrahamsson, Viewfinder Norman Seider's films and photographs are in the permanent collection of major museums and collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Houston's Museum of Fine Arts; and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. 94 pages, 111/2 x 91/2, 53 duotones. Published 2006. BACK TO TOP