Storm Warning is an absorbing collection of interconnected stories set against the backdrop of Yemassee Island, a Georgia coastal area shaped by the mercurial forces of nature and stubborn human resilience. In stories that span more than a century, Wilson explores how a landscape defined by change affects the people who either feel bound to the land or yearn to escape. Each of her compelling characters wrestles with personal demons—from guilt over the heartbreaking disappearance of a little boy during a hurricane to the turmoil wrought by family dysfunction across several generations, and from the wreckage of impulsive actions brought on by sudden crises to the ordinary emotions of ordinary people trying to live their best lives. In prose by turns lyrical and spare, Storm Warning offers an evocative portrait of a rugged place and the people who endure even the most unforgiving twists of fate.

            —Cynthia Reeves, author of The Last Whaler and Falling Through the New World

Rising floods, wild storm winds and lighthouse ghosts pour through these fascinating tied stories of a Southern town and a handful of its occupants on the edge of the ocean. Each intimate story is an enchantment all its own. Storms rage as intensely within the lives of a mother who has lost a child, a husband abandoned, a middle-aged couple who have inherited an inn with unseen difficulties and then, flipping back to a century before, the lighthouse apprentice who takes the job to have enough to eat. 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 Cottage: a novel of the Brontë sisters, American Book Award recipient

In Storm Warning, Gerry Wilson digs deep into the broken lives of island people of the American South—brides and grooms, inn workers, cooks, and handymen, addicts and ex-cons—a people who live at the edges of things, hanging on for their lives to the shifting, storm-ripped sands of Yemassee Island. Turning the illusion of a genteel resort world on its head, Wilson’s deft hand conjures the dark magic of those who may not last the night in their shipwrecked lives. 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

With Storm Warning, Gerry Wilson adds another unique, enduring ZIP code to the vast geography of Southern fiction. Told in precise, spare prose, these stories weave an immersive, centuries-spanning mythology of fictional Yemassee Island, where hurricanes and internal storms alike have battered its inhabitants for generations. I was moved by Wilson’s imagery and compassion and how she captures the quiet desperation of these characters as they struggle with love and loss and desire and madness and that eternal ebb and flow of whether to stay or leave or return home. 

            —Robert Busby, author of Bodock: Stories

These stories are stunning. Wilson is so good at capturing and illuminating this place that I feel like I know fictional Yemassee Island, Georgia intimately. Aptly titled, Storm Warning isn’t for the faint of heart; the storms do arrive and leave their messes, but there is richness and beauty amidst the loss. 

            —Mary Miller, author of Biloxi: A Novel and Always Happy Hour: Stories

Storm Warning, Gerry Wilson’s fantastic, linked story collection, is woven as tightly and precisely as a cast net, each story radiating its own unique dramatic power, yet at the same time serving as a distinct echo of all the others in the book. Wilson’ ability to manage this imaginative complexity is a tribute to her skill as a storyteller. Yemassee Island, on the Georgia coast near Savannah, serves as the geographic centerpiece of the collection, and we witness each character and timeline reacting to the gravitational (and emotional) pull of the island. Ultimately, Wilson’s collection accomplishes something quite extraordinary: 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 (coming September 2026) and Peace Like a River