Apr 2024

If you’ve ever heard the Frederic Raphael quote, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.”—John Berendt flips this saying on its head in this nonfiction work that reads like a bedtime story. An enchanting, vibrant and laugh-out-loud look into the offset Southern city of Savannah, Georgia, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil breathes new life into the rich, dark and colorful history of this picturesque hamlet with characters that jump off the page. An incredible array of larger-than-life personalities give us a peek into extraordinary circumstances including (but not limited to) the threat of mass poisoning by an insect-obsessed DIY scientist, good-natured cons of a piano playing lawyer, voodoo attempts at thwarting a guilty verdict in a murder trial and a card game so coveted it maintains an eternal waitlist. Whether Berendt has a way of attracting the juiciest of stories or the city of Savannah itself elicits eclectic, heated and fascinating drama from its residents is hard to say as this one-of-a-kind geography lives and breathes as a character of its own that captivates, enthralls and leaves us wanting more.