Dolly Parton has co-authored a novel with James Patterson
The country singer's first novel, Run, Rose, Run is due March 2022
The perfect crossover doesn’t exi—
Legendary country singer, actor, philanthropist, Buffy The Vampire Slayer producer, and Moderna vaccine funder Dolly Parton has teamed up with prolific author James Patterson on the singer’s first novel, titled Run, Rose, Run. What a truly unexpected sentence.
Set in Nashville, Run, Rose, Run is a novel about “a young woman who comes to country music’s capital city to pursue her music-making dreams. The source of her heart-wrenching songs is a brutal secret she has done everything to hide. But the past she has fled is reaching out to control her future—even if it means destroying everything she has worked for.”
The queen of country has also written, performed, and produced a twelve track album inspired by Run, Rose, Run, which will release in partnership with the book in March 2022.
“I cannot be more excited about the release of my very first novel Run, Rose, Run with the great James Patterson,” Parton says of her writing counterpart. “All new songs were written based on the characters and situations in the book. I hope you enjoy the book and the songs as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it all together!”
While this is Parton’s first novel, it is certainly not Patterson’s. The Alex Cross writer has penned more than 200 novels over his career, spanning the thriller, romance, and fiction genres. Now: Are all of these books excellent? Far from it. But are they entertaining? Almost uniformly. Patterson’s most recent literary collaboration was The President Is Missing, a thriller written with former President Bill Clinton.
“It’s been an honor—and a hell of a lot of fun—to work with the inimitable Dolly Parton, whom I’ve long admired for her music, her storytelling, and her enormous generosity” Patterson says. “The mind-blowing thing about this project is that reading the novel is enhanced by listening to the album and vice versa. It’s a really unique experience that I know readers (and listeners) will love.”
Run, Rose, Run will be published on March 7, 2022.