Yance Wyatt’s The Watersmith centers on Jack Calloway, a handyman trying to stay sober while navigating one family heartbreak after another in the Tennessee Valley. He finds an old moonshine still his grandfather hid behind a lone cabin, and he and his rebellious teen son,...

The Foundling by Amy Meitz begins in 1978 Detroit, where nine-year-old Sunny Berry has spent years hidden inside a failing apartment. Her mother, Roxanne, insists the child she once loved has been replaced by something evil. Hungry and cut off from the outside world, Sunny...

The Dread from the Drows by Erich Sanchack and Dani Sanchack is the continuation of The Orphans of Nilad. EoC and Kaida Nosam’s journey takes them to the Drows as they search for the Amulet of Planes. Instead of getting closer to home, they find...

In The Serpent Stirs by Ankusha Sutey, Indira is a young, cosmopolitan designer from Mumbai who wins an expenses-paid holiday to the eastern coastal state of Odisha, which has a rich historical and architectural heritage. The days pass in a whirl of sightseeing, temple visits,...

The Trojan Mare is an unusual poetic political satire by Marina Šur-Puhlovski. The story takes us to Yugoslavia, where we meet Rosalie, the youngest daughter of a well-to-do village cooper, and the compatriots she meets along her life path. We then follow Rosalie’s life for...

In Carla Beene’s The Twin Within, our seventh-grade protagonist, Cassie Cortez, has a tough time navigating school in Santa Fe while dealing with cruel school bullies and the physical limitations of mild cerebral palsy. Although her parents provide her with a loving home, Cassie has...

In Herb Guggenheim’s The Goldbach Conjecture, Soleri College enters 2023 as an experimental public liberal arts school where students shape much of their education through pass/fail academic contracts. Its progressive culture has long welcomed students who see themselves as different, but Governor Randall Delago wants...

The Ashes of Us by Ashley Baker is a compelling novel. Very early one morning, Dr. David McCall, a clinical and anatomical pathologist, receives a strange phone call. He is informed that his nineteen-year-old daughter, Addison McCall, is in the hospital. She was assaulted. He...

In the continent of Riolta, lustite is a useful mineral that’s always in demand. However, man-made schemes and inhuman horrors fill the mines’ depths. Nicolas Brennan lives blissfully unaware of all this, despite ruling the kingdom of Myren. As the “Daft King,” Nic stays in...

The Picture Business: Stories About the People Who Make the Movies is an insider’s look at Hollywood. In it, best-selling author Elaine Kagan, who is also a film and television actress, uses her firsthand experience in show business as the template for her fictional (though...