[Cover photo credit to Jeremy Cowart]
Grammy Award–winning music Producer, recording artist, and author Charlie Peacock will release his debut novel, Once Concealed Now Revealed, on November 17, 2026, via It’s Time To Art Press. A layered story of “unexpected friendships, enduring love and a family’s reckoning with its secrets”, the novel “builds toward a single defining question: Can love survive the crucible of the whole, unguarded truth?“
The novel arrives on the heels of Peacock’s 2025 memoir, Roots & Rhythm: A Life in Music. With Once Concealed Now Revealed, Peacock brings to literary fiction “an intimate understanding of the nervous system under stress and the managed silences that shape a family.”
More about the novel’s story:
Moving between the affluent Bay Area, Sacramento and agrarian Tennessee, the novel follows two generations of the Taylor family shaped by trauma and secrecy: a mother whose buried past and inflexible religiosity tore the family apart, and her oldest son Augie, whose success is as much a product of his pain as his giftedness. When Michael, the youngest Taylor sibling, suffers a violent, unprovoked attack, the family rallies around him, and long-buried unspeakables begin to surface. Soon Augie confronts the return of physical symptoms rooted in his own secrets. Though he loves his girlfriend Marie deeply, he cannot bring himself to reveal what is hidden.
A controversial work assignment with millions at stake sends Augie and Marie to Tennessee to seek counsel from writer and sage J. Tapley Dial. At Sugar Creek Farm, among a culturally diverse ensemble cast, they encounter a “soil and soul” life of wisdom, hospitality, useful work and presence, and find courage for what lies ahead. Blending mystery and psychological suspense with a multigenerational family saga, the novel explores a love story under unspeakable pressure, how deeply held beliefs can wound those we love most, and what it costs when success comes at the expense of people and planet.
Peacock says of the novel:
Art has a way of revealing itself to the artist with a mix of intention and mystery. Perhaps this novel came to me because silence and avoidance have killed people I love, and because I have seen — in my own body, family, and faith — what happens when the unspeakable gets buried and when it finally speaks. It may hurt like hell. You may think you are dying. But the truth is, most things — especially love — survive.
Alongside the book, Peacock recorded two original gospel songs inspired by the novel, “Hallelujah, Your Love Has Set Me Free” (out November 20) and “New Life Down at the River” (out November 27).
Both songs appear within the story itself, sung as friends and family gather at the river for a baptism. Peacock wrote and produced “New Life Down at the River,” which features the Once Concealed Now Revealed Choir, a group of supporters who earned a spot on the recording by backing the book’s Kickstarter campaign.
He co-produced “Hallelujah, Your Love Has Set Me Free” with his son, Oscar- and Grammy-nominated songwriter Sam Ashworth, who is also featured on the track. Both singles will be released on Peacock’s It’s Time To Art label.
The campaign also includes a five-minute filmed scene featuring Katie Boeck and Chloé Godard that offers a dramatized encounter with the novel’s characters and world.
On Friday, November 20, the same day “Hallelujah, Your Love Has Set Me Free” is released, Peacock will celebrate Once Concealed Now Revealed with a release event at 6:30 p.m. at Parnassus Books (3900 Hillsboro Pike, Suite 14, Nashville, Tennessee). The event is free and open to the public.
More about Charlie Peacock:
Charlie Peacock is a GRAMMY® Award–winning music producer, recording artist and author. Named by Billboard’s Encyclopedia of Record Producers as one of the 500 most important producers in music history, his five-decade career spans work with Switchfoot, The Civil Wars, Béla Fleck, Chris Cornell, Amy Grant, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and hundreds more. His credits range from No. 1 Billboard debuts and the 12 Years a Slave soundtrack to “Hush,” the title theme to the AMC drama Turn: Washington’s Spies. His jazz collaborators include John Patitucci, Chris Potter, Turtle Island Quartet and Ravi Coltrane.
Peacock has moved between the recording studio, the executive suite, Silicon Valley and the academy, founding Lipscomb University’s Commercial Music Program, co-founding Art House America and the Wedgwood Circle arts investment group, founding the Universal Music imprint Re:Think, and serving as an A&R executive at EMI and Sony/ATV. His memoir, Roots & Rhythm: A Life in Music (Eerdmans, 2025), earned a starred review from Library Journal. Once Concealed Now Revealed is his debut novel.
Peacock lives in Nashville with his wife, author Andi Ashworth. The couple are coauthors of Why Everything That Doesn’t Matter, Matters So Much: The Way of Love in a World of Hurt (W Publishing/HarperCollins, 2024).
