In Linda Annas Ferguson’s What the Mirrors Knew, Anna Grace O’Neill lives alone beside the Ashley River in Charleston after losing her husband and settling into a familiar life. When Grace finds a journal belonging to her Irish grandmother, Aine, an inscription from the grandfather...

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...

Irina Kvistberg’s Continuum follows Lea Voss, a researcher in the Biological Reserve, one of the few places left outside the smooth routines of an optimized future. When an unexplained perceptual event reaches Lea during synchronization, the System labels it harmless noise, yet sealed records connect...

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 Her mother, Roxanne, insists the child she once loved has been replaced by something evil.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

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...