Some people hit rock bottom. In Alaskan Humble Pie by Natasha Von Imhof, rock star Ryder Hartley hits it on stage, in front of a crowd, blanking out on the words of his own lyrics. He flees the stage only to run straight into a...

Ken Wall’s Bathing With JFK centers on Austin Grant, a Houston lawyer who once found his model for greatness in a John F. Kennedy biography that he read in the bathtub before graduation. Ten years later, Austin is trapped in legal work that has given...

Glenscott Thomas Copper’s Angels Dance on the Head of a Pin follows Scott Rankin, a small red-haired Catholic boy from 1962 La Crosse, after his family’s breakup pushes him from St. John’s parish school toward Chicago. Scott wants to become the priest his Italian grandmother...

The Adventures of Kimo by Eric A. Javier captures the feeling of being a young child desperate to escape a mundane afternoon. Kimo is stuck at home because a thick fog has blanketed the California coast, ending any chance of his going to the beach....

Annie Dike crafts a story about what remains when the ground gives way in this big-hearted saga of trauma and grit. Clovis tells the story of Calliope “Callie” Potts, which begins with a prologue in which her brother Jude’s little sandcastle washes away in the...

Martha Conway’s novel, We Meet Apart, is a deeply haunting historical novel interwoven with intriguing speculative fiction and supernatural elements. The story, set in 1940 during WWII, has two concurrent timelines. In one timeline, Ireland is a free, neutral country. In a second timeline, the...

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...

In T. N. R. Rogers’s Life Is Everywhere, Sand Hargrove remains in Iowa after Lafay accepts a dance-teaching post in Baton Rouge and eventually takes their young son Joby with her. Sand has never recovered from the death of their infant daughter Rachel, so knowing...

In J.R. Thibeault’s Michael’s Loop, fourteen-year-old Michael Wilson moves with his mother, Linda, away from Toronto to Southford, a small town hollowed out by closed businesses and a shrinking school. Basketball earns him a place at Eastgate, where he meets Jessica, a history-loving girl most...

True North’s Anasazi Vision follows True after she spends a year caring for her severely ill mother, whose death leaves her unable to stay in the empty Southern Oregon house. True returns to the Four Corners region and prepares for a ten-day vision quest at...