It is 1829. Kathy, a black slave woman, gives birth to a beautiful baby girl fathered by her wealthy master, Mr. Cartwright, and names her Anastasia. Kathy raises her daughter at her master’s mansion, where she works. Mr. Cartwright dotes on Anastasia, and when he...

Thirteen-year-old Sophie’s parents are getting divorced. Her mother, brother Aiden, and sister Logan have moved across town into a small two-bedroom apartment in a dodgy neighborhood because their father lost all their money in a questionable investment scheme. Without his financial support, their day-to-day existence...

In Marcus Conter’s A Light in the Silence, Brazilian musician Mateus has settled in Laval, Quebec, when his father summons him back to southern Brazil. Maria, the mother who held her four sons together, died only three months before her widower, Marlboro, summons them home...

All That Was Left Unsaid by Danielle Dragona is a compelling, heart-rending, and deeply emotional portrayal of love, betrayal, family dynamics, and secrets left untold. Katrina Johnson, at seventy years old, is at a crossroads. Her beloved husband Sam has just died of cancer. She...

Mark Guillerman pens a sweeping historical novel in A Heart That’s True, set in the aftermath of the 19th-century Indian Wars. The novel follows two Lakota children, twelve-year-old Joseph Cross, named Blue Thunder at birth, and his cousin, White Cloud, as they are ripped away...

The plan was simple: six-year-old Patrice Johnson was supposed to meet an untimely end, and Crossing, an aptly named crossing guard, was the one selected to chaperone Patrice to the afterlife. Crossing gets his assignment mixed up, and things go awry. Since Crossing needs to...

An Aspiration to Lie Flat by Stanton Fenwick is a hilarious story of a man with one big ambition in life: to be left alone. But when he wins a corporate sweepstake and is thrust into stardom on the internet, all his plans are shot...

Detective Winston Radhauser faces the worst nightmare that can befall any parent in Susan Clayton-Goldner's A Harbor of Hope. In the dead of the night, someone wounds their stallion, Ameer, in the barn. Radhauser and Gracie go to bed tired that night after having the...

In Eilidh MacTavish's Any Way Out, an unnamed child lives with Pop, a father who destroys her youth with physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Mother, who is also a victim, still lashes out at the child and blames her for much of the abuse. As...

A call for help unravels a plot to return native land to its rightful owners in R.L. Keck’s Absence of Mercy. The story features two explosive crises. In Wyoming, a radical “Professor” is said to be falsifying soil contamination reports, and E.J. Lonetree is dispatched...