In Ellen Barker’s Lulu in the Loop, twenty-two-year-old Louise “Lulu” Johnson spends the summer in University City, Missouri, living in the apartment of her older sister Novelle, who has left St. Louis for a year-long academic fellowship. Lulu is about to enter her final year...

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 Samantha Kolber’s What She Stole, adult Eloise Goldstein discovers during bodywork that childhood experiences may still be stored in her body. That takes her back to seventeen, when she is caught stealing a gold sequined purse from Macy’s during prom shopping with best friend...

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...

Edmond Thornfield’s Atalanta of the Wild follows Atalanta, an Arkadian huntress raised in the mountain wilds, after the father who abandoned her returns seeking forgiveness. Lord Iásios invites her into the royal house of Tegea, where she meets siblings she once believed she would never...