The Train to Quebec by Julia Baeten follows Gabriella, a woman in her thirties who feels drained by her routine life and is desperate for a fresh start. After leaving behind a difficult past and an unfulfilling job, she boards a train to Quebec City,...

How does one woman find purpose after heartbreak? This question is at the heart of The Cold Heart of War by Juliann Dorell. The story begins just before the Civil War, and centers on Beatrice Bradley, a strong-willed, thoughtful woman dealing with personal loss while...

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...