In Richard Siciliano’s The Man Who Obviated Christmas, Edward Brash, a middle-aged manager who has spent years limiting his life to work and routine, walks out of his office on Christmas Eve and is pulled into a street crisis when children tell him their kitten...

In Beth Brookhart's The Four Queens of the Buttonbush Museum, Irene Pickett joins the board of the Buttonbush Museum after losing her newspaper role, stepping into a neglected area where Odilia Delgado is already using her political access to secure control. Their opposing decisions drive...

“The boy was an unknown, but Claire thought unknowns could eventually make something of themselves.” Of course she did, because Claire Benson, the protagonist of The Dyer Legacy by Albert Sipes, is goodhearted to a fault. The story begins when Claire narrowly escapes two would-be...

In The Cuban Manuscript, Lilian George tracks the life of Liana, a woman who escapes one suffocating communist regime only to find herself trapped in another one just like it. She starts in a Soviet-controlled country where her family’s property is taken away from them...

In Kristen A. Peters's The Shape of His World, Holding Them Both, a mother fights for her boys because the world will not listen to them. Iris is a mother raising two autistic sons, Dylan and Jesse, in a home arranged around routine, sensory needs,...

In Nicholas Teeguarden’s The Boy from the Vines, in Paris, Ruth finds a journal written by Joseph Durand, a young man living on a French vineyard during the German occupation of 1940, and begins tracing his movements to determine whether he was a real person....

In Those Coming Back by Alanna R. Clutter, readers meet a young girl named Catherine. It’s 1869, and she and her family are about to embark on a big move, leaving Ohio and her maternal grandparents to go to Iowa to help work her paternal...

“How could I have been so obtuse, so neglectful that my dying son hated me until the end?” For Joe Fredericks, the protagonist of Wayne Feinstein's novel, Turning, it took little effort to be such a sleazeball. Joe is the definition of success in one...

In The Boy with the Butterfly Mind by Lorelei Brush, readers meet Julie, a math teacher juggling her job, marriage, and the nonstop energy of her four-year-old son, Patrick. She feels deeply proud of him, but also worried. His moods range from exuberant curiosity to...

The Time Between by Bryna Hellmann-Gillson looks at several young Jewish women and how they responded to the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam during World War II. Hannah, like Anne Frank, spent her early years in Germany, but her family moved to the Netherlands after the...