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Storm Warning
When the storms rage, you will feel the water pulling you in. A unique, harrowing, and strangely beautiful book.
-Stephanie Cowell, author of The Boy in the Rain and The Man in the Stone a novel of the Brontë sisters, American Book Award recipient
In prose that sparks with electricity, these stories set the gazebo on fire, and leave us astonished at what devastations humans, and islands, can live through.
- Marjorie Hudson, author of Indigo Field, Accidental Birds of the Carolinas, and Searching for Virginia Dare
Ultimately, Wilson's collection accomplishes something quite it creates a rich, dramatic world that is novelistic in scope, while building this world one remarkable story at a time. -Scott Gould, author of Beneath a Fallen Sky and Peace Like a River
On Georgia's barrier islands, ancient tides carve away memory and hurricanes reshape both landscape and lives.
A young woman with inherited psychic gifts searches the marshes for her missing brother. A grieving widow faces her estranged daughter across the ruins of their family inn. At an abandoned lighthouse, a young husband carrying an unbearable secret finds unexpected grace. A minister walks into the ocean seeking something he cannot name. A lighthouse keeper waits for a girl who will never return.
These eleven linked stories explore the liminal spaces where the living meet the dead, where faith confronts doubt, and where love persists despite devastating loss. Characters cross paths at the Island Escape Inn, on dolphin boats, at beach weddings-their separate griefs quietly weaving through generations.
With prose that honors both the beauty and brutality of coastal life, Gerry Wilson illuminates how we survive what we cannot outrun-and sometimes find our way home.
Ultimately, Wilson's collection accomplishes something quite it creates a rich, dramatic world that is novelistic in scope, while building this world one remarkable story at a time. -Scott Gould, author of Beneath a Fallen Sky and Peace Like a River
On Georgia's barrier islands, ancient tides carve away memory and hurricanes reshape both landscape and lives.
A young woman with inherited psychic gifts searches the marshes for her missing brother. A grieving widow faces her estranged daughter across the ruins of their family inn. At an abandoned lighthouse, a young husband carrying an unbearable secret finds unexpected grace. A minister walks into the ocean seeking something he cannot name. A lighthouse keeper waits for a girl who will never return.
These eleven linked stories explore the liminal spaces where the living meet the dead, where faith confronts doubt, and where love persists despite devastating loss. Characters cross paths at the Island Escape Inn, on dolphin boats, at beach weddings-their separate griefs quietly weaving through generations.
With prose that honors both the beauty and brutality of coastal life, Gerry Wilson illuminates how we survive what we cannot outrun-and sometimes find our way home.
236 pages, Paperback
Published October 6, 2026
About the author
Gerry Wilson
5 books37 followersA seventh generation Mississippian, Gerry Wilson was born thirty miles from William Faulkner's Oxford and far from just about everywhere else. She is the author of THAT PINSON GIRL, Regal House Publishing, February 2024, and a story collection, Crosscurrents and Other Stories (Press 53). She lives in Jackson, Mississippi.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Author
A door opens... and a door closes, and between the two lives Storm Warning, Gerry Wilson's breathtaking collection of linked stories. This book is a work of art and a study of the realities of humanity and grief tempered with hope. Choosing life on the edge of the ocean—a Pandora's box of ever-changing, eternally fateful waters—the characters wrestle with life's greatest challenges, overlapping with each other and with the ghosts of the past as they move through ordinary and extraordinary life events that leave some stranded and others catapulted into a new life. Wilson spares no words while mastering the characters, immersing the reader in the small beach town and the intimate ecosystem within. The push and pull of Storm Warning feels much like being swept into a riptide—exhilarating, scary, and if you get out of it, illuminating and beautiful. I didn't want to put it down, and I was disappointed only because it ended.
Review of advance copy received from Author
Storm Warning Unleashes Gorgeous Prose and Gripping Drama - A Southern barrier island pulses with breathtaking beauty as well as heart-stopping danger, in Storm Warning, and author Gerry Wilson’s lyrical storytelling will keep readers spellbound. In her cleverly interconnected stories, Yemassee Island’s extreme weather mirrors human conflicts, from struggling marriages to lost children. Against a stunning backdrop where “the ocean shades from azure to lapis, the surf like froth,” this epic collection documents the lives of a widowed innkeeper, a hungry teenager’s job as a lightkeeper, a minister’s mid-life search for purpose, a young woman’s longing to connect with her mother, and much more. Wilson is a master of suspense with a deep understanding of love, loss, hope, and resilience. Readers will flip pages faster than a hurricane as they race to learn how each storm affects the community, the landscape, and Wilson’s precisely crafted characters. I highly recommend this gorgeous collection of compelling stories.
October 6, 2026
When Gerry Wilson drops you into a story, brace yourself. STORM WARNING, her collection of linked tales set around the fictional Yemassee Island, is about harsh weather and more human storms. Relationships splinter. Familial bonds fray. This is not escapism. This is the real, true thing — a gifted storyteller following Faulkner’s edict that the only thing worth writing about is “the human heart in conflict with itself.”
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews