In Richard Siciliano’s The Man Who Obviated Christmas, Edward Brash, a middle-aged manager who has spent years limiting his life to work and routine, walks out of his office on Christmas Eve and is pulled into a street crisis when children tell him their kitten...

“The boy was an unknown, but Claire thought unknowns could eventually make something of themselves.” Of course she did, because Claire Benson, the protagonist of The Dyer Legacy by Albert Sipes, is goodhearted to a fault. The story begins when Claire narrowly escapes two would-be...

Recently divorced, jobless, and living in his sister’s house in Hollywood, California, thirty-year-old Robert Donegan was looking for any job to keep him afloat. When a friend refers him to a contact named Antonio, who is willing to pay him $3,000 to drive a removal...

In Ion Parreah’s The Cost of Knowing, after the death of his childhood friend Karen O’Neil and a public declaration that unsettles his parish, Father David Callaghan leaves Newcastle West and travels to Namibia in search of an answer to a question that has begun...

The Music Room by Margaret Farrell Kirby centers on Cath, a fifty-two-year-old nurse who starts to feel like something in her life just isn’t working anymore. After losing her mother at a young age, she pushed aside her dream of becoming a writer, and now...

The Inhabited Arc by Joe Trabocco is a collection of three short stories, all standalones and each enveloped in the singular consciousness of its narrator. In Epiphany, Lydia is in a coastal house where daily life by the shore slowly awakens an inner awareness, leading...

The Last Heretic by Steve Goldsmith follows Archelaus, a clever and skeptical scribe navigating the dangerous dynamics of early Christianity during the Council of Nicaea. Set in 325 AD, the story moves between political salons, bishops’ chambers, and dimly lit writing rooms, bringing the early...

Two Hearts Within One Soul: Bound By The Invisible Red Thread by Maurius Muze opens in post-WWII Hampshire, England, where the main character, Layla, has settled into a life that is as predictable as the ticking of a clock. In her early fifties, her days...

The Fixer: The Shape of Her by Ozzie Logozzo is one of those books that hits you with its intensity right from the very first page. It isn't just a story you read; it’s one you feel. I was completely floored by the prose here....

“The truth? It don't fit clean. Life don't work like no sermon or a newspaper headline. It's messy. It bleeds.” Life does these things and more, and messy can be an understatement as The Bible Of Blackwater County, a novel by Jenny Cafaro, clearly illustrates....