A classic love story full of mountain music from one of North Carolina’s greatest living balladeers, a loving portrait of a North Carolina beach by a modern prophet of coastal catastrophe, a fictional look into the recent past in small eastern North Carolina towns, and a novel that explains an old marker in a Beaufort graveyard.

These are the latest and the final summer reading assignments (I mean suggestions) for your vacation reading.

Madison County’s Sheila Kay Adams is a living legend among the fans of the music of the Appalachian mountains. Thanks to Doug Orr’s and Fiona Ritchie’s recent book, “Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia,” Adams has gained an even wider group of admirers. For her storytelling gifts and musical talents, the book cites her more than 25 times, and the accompanying CD contains her performance of the ballad “Young Hunting/Elzig’s Farewell.” That tune begins, “Come in, come in my old true love, and spend this night with me,” and is the source for the title to Adams’ 2004 novel, “My Own True Love.”

Set in the mountains during Civil War times, it is, like the old ballads Adams sings, a story of fierce and lost love. Two boys, close friends and cousins, battling for the love of the same girl, cannot make for a happy ending. But for the reader it can be a poignant reading experience, akin to listening to Adams singing a ballad.

For many years, retired Duke Professor Orrin Pilkey has been studying the North Carolina coast. Like an Old Testament prophet he has been warning us of coming catastrophes unless we change our policies. Global warming, rising sea levels, thoughtless development near water’s edge, and barrier building will lead to the devastation of our shorelines. His new book, “The Last Beach,” co-authored by J. Andrew G. Cooper, makes an unassailable case for preserving and strengthening regulations controlling building at or near the beaches.

His earlier book, “How to Read a North Carolina Beach,” though much less policy oriented, is a valuable introduction to the complex history and makeup of our shorelines, even showing us that some of the sands on our beaches came from our mountains not far from where Sheila Kay Adams lives.

Sheila Kay Adams is not the only musician who writes books. Charles Blackburn, author of “Sweet Soul,” played guitar and sang with the group, “When Cousins Marry,” beginning in 1981. He grew up in Henderson and worked all over the Carolinas as a reporter and editor, bookstore owner, and publicist for a medical center and a national scientific fraternity. Those experiences gave him a rich source for his imaginative short stories. For example, in “The Outlaw,” set in Anson County’s Lilesville, the outlaw, “Fireball” Catlett, demands from the editor extra copies of his paper’s coverage of his gang’s exploits. The editor agrees on the condition that his newspaper will have exclusive coverage of Catlett’s planned surrender to authorities. Catlett asks only, “Will you take pictures?”

“The Story of Land and Sea,” Katy Simpson Smith’s debut novel, is set in the small coastal town of Beaufort around the time of the American Revolution. It follows generations of families under stress—fathers and daughters, mother and son, masters and slaves. There is war and piracy, kidnapping and escape and a challenge to religious faith in a God who presides over tragic loss. It is also a story that provides a fictional solution to the puzzle of a gravesite in Beaufort marked with “Little girl in a rum keg.”

UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch will feature these authors on upcoming programs.

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D.G. Martin

Contributing Columnist