Some people hit rock bottom. In Alaskan Humble Pie by Natasha Von Imhof, rock star Ryder Hartley hits it on stage, in front of a crowd, blanking out on the words of his own lyrics. He flees the stage only to run straight into a...

Eric Bush’s The Meaning of Androsia is an epic odyssey that follows Ilya Erynovich Koskayin, also known throughout his two-thousand-year-old life by thirty different names. He wakes up in a train station with no memory, yet his instinct brings back skills and knowledge that can...

Ken Wall’s Bathing With JFK centers on Austin Grant, a Houston lawyer who once found his model for greatness in a John F. Kennedy biography that he read in the bathtub before graduation. Ten years later, Austin is trapped in legal work that has given...

Glenscott Thomas Copper’s Angels Dance on the Head of a Pin follows Scott Rankin, a small red-haired Catholic boy from 1962 La Crosse, after his family’s breakup pushes him from St. John’s parish school toward Chicago. Scott wants to become the priest his Italian grandmother...

The Adventures of Kimo by Eric A. Javier captures the feeling of being a young child desperate to escape a mundane afternoon. Kimo is stuck at home because a thick fog has blanketed the California coast, ending any chance of his going to the beach....

Annie Dike crafts a story about what remains when the ground gives way in this big-hearted saga of trauma and grit. Clovis tells the story of Calliope “Callie” Potts, which begins with a prologue in which her brother Jude’s little sandcastle washes away in the...

Martha Conway’s novel, We Meet Apart, is a deeply haunting historical novel interwoven with intriguing speculative fiction and supernatural elements. The story, set in 1940 during WWII, has two concurrent timelines. In one timeline, Ireland is a free, neutral country. In a second timeline, the...

Mark Guillerman pens a sweeping historical novel in A Heart That’s True, set in the aftermath of the 19th-century Indian Wars. The novel follows two Lakota children, twelve-year-old Joseph Cross, named Blue Thunder at birth, and his cousin, White Cloud, as they are ripped away...

Tsung-Long Wu’s Entropy Gate follows Chen Ya-Lin as she maintains a structured lifestyle to survive a deep, silent grief that has lasted for fifteen years. Her home runs on a strict schedule, which keeps her focused and prevents her from looking back at her late...

In T. N. R. Rogers’s Life Is Everywhere, Sand Hargrove remains in Iowa after Lafay accepts a dance-teaching post in Baton Rouge and eventually takes their young son Joby with her. Sand has never recovered from the death of their infant daughter Rachel, so knowing...