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...

Still Yours is a gripping Gothic literary novella by bestselling author Jacob Anthony Rose. A fortnight before Valentine’s Day, Julian Mercer receives an unexpected package without a return address. Tucked beneath the packing slip is an envelope, and Julian recognizes the handwriting of his husband...

Sometimes the biggest life changes begin in the middle of an ordinary day. In You Must Believe in Spring by Steven Hutton, Evan and his girlfriend, Ellen, are trying to figure out their future after discovering that she is pregnant. The news wasn’t planned, and...

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 Her mother, Roxanne, insists the child she once loved has been replaced by something evil.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

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...