In Oh Marty by Deen Chris, Marty is a first year secondary school student in Guyana whose mathematics marks bring violent punishment at home because his parents see his difficulty as laziness and disobedience. Numbers seem to shift when he tries to work, while the...

Some losses divide life into before and after. In Jessica by Richard Friday Greene, Pearce Goode is trying to make sense of his childhood. Growing up, home isn’t always a safe or happy place. His father uses harsh physical punishment, and his mother struggles with...

Sometimes the people closest to us are the ones we understand the least. In A Thousand Touches by David Shams, Cyrus Soltani is preparing for his senior year of high school in Bardstown, Kentucky. Soccer has been the center of his life, and several colleges...

Jack Rife’s In the Heart of the Beast is set in Austin in the final days of 1976, where Michael Claiborne Duval has inherited a family mansion while running Duval-O’Duggan, an underground marijuana operation with a regional network. Michael has promised military weapons to Lenín...

Mitch Russo’s Sacred Crossroads follows Noble Manning, a sixty-year-old hardware-store owner in Cedar Springs, Massachusetts, whose life has been built around routine and measurable facts. Strange shadows begin appearing inside Manning’s Hardware, then objects shift in ways Noble cannot explain. When his daughter Sarah returns...

Nataliya Falevich’s Velvet Blade follows Azarêa, a merchant’s daughter raised beside an ancient fig tree as heat begins connecting the girl to women who came before her. Her mother secretly teaches Azarêa to read memory in oil, while elderly Teta Shira offers understanding of the...

In William Amos’s The Seed of Joy, American Peace Corps volunteer Paul Harkin arrives in South Korea in 1979, where he falls in love with Han Mi Jin, an English teacher involved in the democracy movement. Their relationship comes under pressure when Mi Jin’s parents...

I Was Angry & Now I’m At Peace by Ray Toy centers on Tybalt, a Philadelphia-based pharmaceutical journalist and artist who is fighting to stay afloat amid severe emotional dysregulation. Written as a sequence of intimate journal entries, the book tracks Tybalt’s attempts to heal...

The Ninth Life of Missy by Raj Shankar follows May Calloway, a twenty-three-year-old sitting in a half-packed Greenport apartment, days away from a one-way move to Ireland. Her carefully closed-off world is turned upside down when her rescue cat, Missy, suddenly starts talking to her...

In Fractured: The Other Side, author David W Hadley presents a harrowing portrait of a father trying to maintain order while his wife undergoes a full psychological and physical collapse rooted in unaddressed trauma. The mother’s abrupt behavioral shift triggers horrific road-based hallucinations, unmanaged seizures,...