In Christopher Renna’s The Life & Death of Mason Donovan, bestselling novelist James Ryan is invited to write the biography of Mason Donovan, an award-winning Hollywood actor whose death during a sailing trip has left many questions unanswered. Raised in Kansas, Mason becomes a successful...

In Abraham Randall’s Take Me With You, a waiter who runs the floor at a breakfast restaurant at O’Hare posts a photo of a dying plant. A stranger in Bogotá corrects him. It is a Monstera deliciosa, not a philodendron. What follows is months of...

M. A. Coupe’s The Cyclist: Carbon Fingerprints follows Alex, a gifted Chicago cyclist riding the Trans-Britain Ultra, an arduous charity race across Britain. An old injury has left Alex with nerve damage that can interrupt an otherwise exceptional performance, yet racing remains the one place...

In The Envelopes, Hasu August draws back the veil on modern Chinese life. Jade Bai begins her career in the city as a nurse, but later trains in personnel. She is married to Deeping Dai, who lectures at the local university, and they share an...

Are you ready for some short stories that will give you food for thought? In The Diversity Bridesmaid by Lilian George, that’s exactly what you’ll get. Here is a taste of what you’ll find in these pages. The bridesmaid in the title story has a...

Stephen Panus’s novel, The Circles We Carry, is a heart-wrenching and profoundly thoughtful story of a family’s unexpected, deep loss and their harrowing journey through grief in search of a way forward. Jesse Brennan is 17, a junior in Naperville High School in Illinois. He...

The Secret-Keeper’s Shipwreck: Mayhem in Gold Rush San Francisco by Jess Wells is a delightful historical novel set in the Wild West early days of San Francisco. Before gold was discovered, San Francisco was nothing more than a tiny, poor village by the bay without...

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 Her mother, Roxanne, insists the child she once loved has been replaced by something evil.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...

A murder charge forces two childhood friends to confront a past neither has completely left behind. In The Sorrows of Gathering by D. A. Dorwart, successful San Francisco attorney Rebecca Martin receives an unexpected call from Nolan Gathering, the boy who was once her closest...