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Publisher’s Synopsis:

“When a volcano suddenly emerges in the middle of his family’s Alabama cattle pasture, young Charlie Melvin is confronted with a promise his grandfather once made—that something extraordinary would rise from the land. As Charlie comes of age, he wrestles with the meaning of the volcano and the legacy of his family. His story unfolds through evocative vignettes that explore love, loss, responsibility, and faith.

Graceful, tender, and emotionally resonant, Bradley Sides’ The Volcano Keeper is a moving portrait of a young man navigating grief while discovering the quiet miracles woven into the natural world.”

Press & Praise:

“20 New Books We Can’t Wait To Read This Fall” & “9 Books That Deserve A Spot On Your October Reading List” at Southern Living

“15 Small Press Titles You Should Be Reading This Fall” at Electric Literature

“The Best Southern Books of October 2026” at Southern Review of Books

“Fall/Winter Reading List 2026-27” at Deep South Magazine

Cover reveal at Electric Literature

“The Volcano Keeper is part The Waltons and part magical realism. Charlie’s adventures, fears, and goodness will keep the reader going. This is a remarkable novella.”

 —George Singleton, author of The Curious Lives of Non-Profit Martyrs

“The Volcano Keeper is a tender, unsparing story of the Melvin family and the wild world that thrives around them. I fell headlong into their adventures—calf-birthing, biscuit-baking, June bug-chasing, rat snake-coaxing, and worrying and working the land they love as it trembles beneath their feet. I won’t soon forget Charlie, his beloveds and beagle-dog Rufus, nor his steadfast faith in what matters most in the here and in the hereafter. Bradley Sides writes with a deep, poetic beauty, capturing the loves and griefs we shoulder in a language shaped by sinew and blood.”

 —Jolene McIlwain, author of Sidle Creek, an NPR and Library Journal best book of the year

"Bradley Sides writes with a tender wonder that’ll leave you weeping and slack-jawed. The Volcano Keeper is a mythic tale about life’s eternal concerns. You’ll read this book in one big gulp, then go back for more."

—Caleb Johnson, author of Treeborne

“With The Volcano Keeper, Bradley Sides offers up a fable of family love and stewardship that will stay with you long after you finish this captivating novella. When Charlie loses his grandfather, and a volcano appears on the family farm, he takes care of the home place and manages to balance loss with joy and wonder. Sides renders the southern landscape and its traditions in gorgeous, vivid detail, as he offers up a tender, hopeful story of the love between a boy and his grandad and the caretaking legacy that bonds them.”

—Ellen Birkett Morris, author of Beware the Tall Grass and Lost Girls

“I most surely recognize and remember the Alabama that Bradley Sides writes about in this fine novella—except for the volcano that suddenly but very believably makes its appearance on the Melvin family land. Its presence is a mystery that both characters and readers must divine. The question is, will it destroy or will its magic remake the lost world we all long to recover? What I don’t doubt is the magic of this book.”

 —Marlin Barton, author of Children of Dust and Pasture Art  

“The Volcano Keeper is a meditation on family, land, and acceptance of things we can’t quite explain. ….Tender, thoughtful, and filled with the wonder of everyday life.”

 —Wendy J. Fox, Electric Literature

“Young Charlie Melvin’s life changes when a mysterious volcano rises from his family’s Alabama cattle pasture, bringing to life a promise his grandfather once made about something extraordinary emerging from the land. Through a series of heartfelt vignettes, Charlie reflects on family, faith, love, loss, and the meaning of legacy as he comes of age.'“

—Kait Hanson, Southern Living

“The prose is beautiful. Tender but not sentimental, poetic but not obscure. There is a simplicity and a truth to the descriptions and the invocation of the natural world to tell this uniquely human story… Like poetry, like scripture, the words provide something new to glean each time. The language is simple, the poetic details visceral and experiential. This novella could easily appeal to readers of all ages and walks of life… As a former high school English teacher, I would place The Volcano Keeper in the hands of underclassmen, before the future comes knocking and demands to know what their life will be. I would recommend this book to writers, particularly prose writers interested in influencing their work with poetic imagery and sensibilities, since Sides’ prose is so deft and economical.”

—Christopher Bigelow, Chicago Review of Books

“What is beautiful in the South is reintroduced to the reader of Bradley Sides’ The Volcano Keeper. This novella reminds us of all the things still worth loving in this region. The slowness. The aliveness. The quiet that lets meaning get loud. What isn’t said in these pages could easily double the size of this work. But the inconspicuousness in Sides’ tale of the life of Charlie Melvin is what makes this story even more magical than a volcano growing in an Alabama pasture…. This book is filled with the Southern magic worth preserving. It encourages us to notice the June bugs and minnows, to pay close attention to your aunt’s recipe for biscuits, and to sit next to who you love on a porch even without a word exchanged. The ending will rock you harder than your favorite Ted Lasso episode.”

—Toby LeBlanc, Southern Review of Books

“Nature anticipates us because it is us. We belong to its vast, unfolding story, not the other way around. This truth rumbles at the core of Bradley Sides’ debut novella, The Volcano Keeper.…With The Volcano Keeper, Bradley Sides has created a compelling premise for the novella form. When he writes that ‘Charlie admires the beauty of his small, miraculous world,’ this gentle sense of gracious affection extends to the novella itself.”

—Emily Choate, Chapter 16

"This novella is brief, sparse and moving. Three writers I admire—George Singleton, Marlin Barton and Caleb Johnson—all recommended it and they are right."

—Don Noble, Alabama Public Radio

“The language is so descriptive and powerful, especially in the shorter pieces, as if there’s something coiled there, ready to burst.”

—Denton Loving, Cutleaf

“I first met Bradley Sides at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was showcasing his short story collection Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood. We soon discovered our shared loves of magic in fiction and southern literature, and Bradley impressed me with his generous spirit. Those same themes–magic, the South, and deep generosity–also distinguish Bradley’s new novella, The Volcano Keeper”

—Marguerite Sheffer, Necessary Fiction

“Sides’s hugely different but equally audacious new offering, The Volcano Keeper, is a beautifully wrought novella of love, grief, persistence, resilience, and miracles set in pastoral Alabama… One of the book’s vignettes ends with the words, ‘The scene. The words. They linger.’ Those words could serve as a review of this startling, beautiful book… The Volcano Keeper reads like a dream of promise and redemption. It’s a secular statement of hope and optimism. A restrained energy permeates these pages, making the reader anxious to see what comes next. Bradley Sides knows when to stop and leave the reader to their own thoughts. More impressively, he knows when to push ahead and leave the reader breathless.”

—Edward Journey, Alabama Writers’ Forum

“Bradley Sides’s novella The Volcano Keeper is a moving fable of family and love.”

—David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy

“The Volcano Keeper is a rich story, often told in between its chapters and in lines unspoken, about what it means to maintain in spite of doubt, to wait in the face of life racing forward… Sides conveys a tale of religion by striping away cant. He captures the good, the magic of Alabama when in times it can be hard to see.”

—Blaine Duncan, The Alabama Take

Additional Features:

“Volcanic, Universal Inspiration” at Chapter 16

“Calhoun Instructor Pens Debut Novella” at Decatur Daily

“Huntsville Author Bradley Sides Brings ‘The Volcano Keeper’ Home with Local Book Launch” at 256 Today