Chris Fabry is an extraordinary storyteller and his stories have been favourite book club picks of mine for years. It’s my pleasure to host him on the blog. I love his advocacy of fiction and I know you will too! Be sure to enter the giveaway for your chance to win a copy of his newly released novel, A Piece of the Moon, thanks to Tyndale House.

How Fiction Broadens your view and helps you value everyone

I fell in love with stories when I was a child listening to my uncles spin tales of their hunting and fishing exploits during the Depression. In a haze of smoke at my grandmother’s house, I would request the same stories and they would tell them over and over. I laughed and got scared in the same spots every time. My uncles were the first to teach me that if you tell a story well, the listener plays a part.

It’s the same with the written word. In a good story, the reader is right there with Scout and Jem looking for Boo Radley. You feel such empathy and sadness that Cosette has to put up with the abuse of the Thénardiers and such warmth when Jean Valjean approaches her while she is fetching water. In any well-written story, the reader participates in the action.

What this creates inside the reader is not only an ability to see the world through someone else’s experience, but to value that perspective enough to become fully immersed in it. And what I love about the fiction I write and about characters from my home state of West Virginia is that readers expect a caricature or a stereotype and what they encounter is a person with a complex backstory.

For example, one of my main characters in A Piece of the Moon runs a junkyard that her father started. She’s called Pidge because she took in a wounded pigeon that walks the desk in her makeshift office. At first glance, Pidge seems like just another cliché. But as the story progresses, you see the depth of her desires and dreams for the future.

Fiction can call us to look not at the outward appearance but deeper, at the heart. Those are the types of stories I want to tell, ones that take readers on a journey they want to come back to again and again.

Thanks Chris!

When eccentric millionaire Gideon Quidley receives a divine revelation to hide his earthly treasure somewhere in the hills, he sets out to find a fitting hiding spot, choosing only a few Bible verses as clues leading to untold riches of gold, silver, cash . . . and one very unexpected―and very costly―item.

Treasure hunters descend upon the hills of West Virginia, including those surrounding the small town of Emmaus, where TD Lovett and Waite Evers provide the latest updates and the beating heart of the community on radio station Country 16. Neither man is much interested in a wild-goose chase for Quidley’s treasure, though. Waite is busy keeping the station afloat and caring for the bruised souls who have landed there. Meanwhile, TD’s more intent on winning over local junkyard owner Pidge Bledsoe, who has taken in a shy, wounded boy to raise.

But after an estranged friend goes missing searching for the treasure, TD is unexpectedly drawn into the hunt. As TD joins the race to find Quidley’s wealth, he discovers where his own real treasure lies, and he begins to suspect there’s a hidden piece to Gideon Quidley’s treasure that no one could’ve expected.

Chris Fabry is an award-winning author and radio personality who hosts the daily program Chris Fabry Live on Moody Radio. A graduate of the W. Page Pitt School of Journalism at Marshall University and a native of West Virginia, Chris and his wife, Andrea, now live in Arizona and are the parents of nine children.

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Buy at Amazon: A Piece of The Moon or Koorong