K. M. Cookie’s Song of Hummingbird Highway starts when Terri, a music lover, gets rid of her boyfriend. She refuses to shed a tear and cannot imagine that one impulsive night at a Santa Monica reggae club will change her life. Enter Reynold, a beguilingly...

In Frederick Groya’s Good Intentions, Tom Rudnik is a corporate lawyer determined to build the family life expected of him after refusing his attorney father’s plans for his career. He meets Amelia Stanford, a graphic designer from rural Iowa who has built the future she...

Ursula Bloom is the editor of a gutter rag with flagging sales. Desperate to have a win, she decides to print a fake news story about celebrity children’s author Emmie Hobson. The story starts small: a doctored image of an overweight child who died 30...

Kritanut Wattana’s After Us follows Owen, a programmer living in a near-future where artificial intelligence has become part of everyday life. Recently laid off and separated from Jordana and their child, Rowan, Owen is alone in his apartment when every screen delivers the same order:...

Ronnie Sacco’s The Resonance Crossing is set in the authoritarian surveillance state of Dominia, and it follows a low-tier reclamation worker named Luca Ashbourne. In a world where people are forbidden to feel and where emotion is medicated, scored, and suppressed by the National Dominia...

In Opal by Jo Ann Kiser, Opal Beauleigh grows up beside Sarvis Creek in Kentucky with one ambition: becoming an artist. At fifteen, marriage to Wendell Ferguson takes her away from the home she knows, while his search for work carries their family farther from...

Valley High, Mountain Low by Ann Crawford tells the story of Mariella, who, after being married to her handsome, non-monogamous husband for more than a dozen years, decides she has had enough. During COVID-19 in 2020, she sneaks out of their lavish house in the...

Inside Henry Cato by Katharine English opens in present-day Manhattan, where a silver-haired man in a bespoke suit, Henry Cato, listens to the city’s footsteps from his studio, believing that his success story began in darkness. The story flashes back to 1960s rural Kansas, where...

In Tessa Kinsela’s An Unconscious Choice of Chaos, fourteen-year-old Ashley Kelly starts Year Nine certain that every small decision can set off a much bigger result. She trusts the routines of her Queensland home and expects Landon State High School to feel just as familiar....

Hillbilly Monk’s Brisket Wisdom by Billy Monk brings us a really wild premise that perfectly blends rural American life with some heavy psychological exploration. The book follows Billy, an eccentric Oklahoma man who spends his days smoking meat, running an illegal still, and rambling about...