VIDEO of the Day: Interview With Naked and Hungry Author

Today's books video is an interview posted by Ashley Memory, the author of the forthcoming novel Naked and Hungry.

The title of her darkly humorous suspense novel comes from protagonist H.T. McMullen's decision to pare his life down to the bare essentials and move to a one-room cabin in the Piedmont area of North Carolina, she explains. A former loan officer, McMullen rejects materialism and moves to the woods.

Unfortunately, in building his one-room cabin, he stumbles upon, the side of it is actually a hazardous waste dump. So in investigating the pollution, he actually comes in contact with his antithesis. He's the reluctant hero, the laid-back Don Quixote figure, Memory says. He comes in contact with Jessica Beane, the driven, the ambitious environmental activist. And they clash at first, but later their budding passion ignites when she reveals a dangerous secret that links them both to a much larger statewide corruption scandal.

Ingalls Publishing Group in Boone, N.C. will publish Naked and Hungry Nov. 1.