DG Martin interviews Kristin Henderson - While They’re at War

In this episode of North Carolina Bookwatch, Henderson, a military wife herself, reveals how her new book focuses on two very different women at Fort Bragg who are facing their husbands' first deployments. The author shares scenes from the lives of these women and illuminates the overwhelming costs of being married to the military—anticipatory grief; strongly enforced rules concerning infidelity; isolation and alienation from non-deployed military officers and the civilian world; the effects of e-mail, cell phone, and CNN culture; homecoming violence; and much more. The author also discusses her powerful chapters on casualty notification, the challenges military children present to schools, and the complexity of reunions after deployment.

DG Martin interviews David Payne - Back to Wando Passo

In this episode of North Carolina Bookwatch, the Payne shares his fast-paced adventure story filled with lyrical writing, wicked humor, and unforgettable characters. The Henderson, NC, native reveals how Back to Wando Passo propels its two love stories, linked by place through time, to a simultaneous crescendo of betrayal, revenge, and redemption, that asks whether the present is doomed to ceaselessly repeat the past— or if it can sometimes change and redeem it.

DG Martin interviews John Hope Franklin - Mirror to America

In this episode of North Carolina Bookwatch, John Hope Franklin shares his personal legacy and the book that Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Severus Lewis has called “a great historian's autobiography that will serve as an indispensable history of our times.”

DG Martin interviews Allan Gurganus - New Stories from the South

In this episode of North Carolina Bookwatch, Gurganus spotlights many of the stories from this year's volume that combines seasoned writers like Tony Earley, Wendell Berry, and George Singleton with gifted newcomers, including Keith Lee Morris, Erin Brooks Worley and J. D. Chapman. Their stories range from a communal love poem for a hunting dog, to a tale of a newly rich retiree trying to micromanage a Hollywood movie and losing his trophy wife to each new young screenwriter, to a harrowing work about a Virginia slave-woman burned alive for witchcraft and many are shared in this special one-on-one interview.

DG Martin interviews Andrew Britton - The American

In this episode of North Carolina Bookwatch, Britton discusses his exciting debut, written at age 21 and crafted in the tradition of the masters—Ludlum, Forsyth, Clancy, Higgins, le Carre—but with a completely contemporary, post-9/11 sensibility. With his first novel published at age 24, this University of North Carolina graduate shares how he hopes to make his mark over the coming decades—shaping the future of contemporary thrillers.

DG Martin interviews Leah Stewart - The Myth of You and Me

Leah Stewart's The Myth of You and Me, the story of Cameron and Sonia's friendship—as intense as any love affair—and its dramatic demise, captures the universal sense of loss and nostalgia that often lingers after the end of an important relationship. In this episode of North Carolina Bookwatch , the Chapel Hill author shares how her searingly honest new novel is a celebration and portrait of a friendship that will appeal to anyone who still feels the absence of that first true friend.

DG Martin interviews Tom Carlson - Hatteras Blues

In this episode of North Carolina Bookwatch, author Tom Carlson shares how, in recording this truly North Carolina story, the author unexpectedly found himself becoming part of it. Struggling to come to terms with the illness and death of his wife to a degenerative disease, Carlson learns a lesson from the Fosters—and the townspeople—in how to prepare for absence and loss, and then how to grieve with some measure of grace and dignity.

DG Martin interviews Bill Smith - Seasoned in the South

Seasoned in the South captures the flavors of the freshest seasonal foods and the spirit of one of the South's liveliest and most innovative kitchens. In this episode of North Carolina Bookwatch, Smith shares the traditional and classic Southern fare that has marked the seasoned chef's unique style throughout his culinary career.

DG Martin interviews William Leuchtenburg - The White House Looks South

In this episode of North Carolina Bookwatch, author and master historian William E. Leuchtenburg combines the vivid biography and political insight of his engrossing study The White House Looks South to offer an engaging account of relations between these three presidents and the South, while also tracing how the region came to embrace a national perspective without losing its distinctive sense of place. The William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of more than a dozen books on twentieth-century American history explores in fascinating detail how each President's unique attachment to "place" helped them to adopt shifting identities, which proved useful in healing rifts between North and South, in altering behavior in regard to race, and in fostering southern economic growth.

DG Martin interviews Dot Jackson - Refuge

In this episode of North Carolina Bookwatch, author Dot Jackson discusses Mary Sen's great escape, along with its guilt and raptures, and in the process, the former prize-winning reporter at the Charlotte Observer shares her debut novel's story of hard-won redemption.