How do you move forward when wounds from the past are still open? Crooked Lines by Sally Barclay Faddis begins as Dahlia Charles gets ready for a family reunion at her inn in Coyote Creek, hoping for the weekend to go well. As she organizes...

Laurence Hutson’s Shattered Faces is set during the First World War, when American sculptor Anna Ladd leaves Boston for Europe after learning that soldiers with severe facial injuries are hiding themselves from families and society. In London, she studies a new process that uses sculpture,...

A Light Within by Ann Nolder Heinz begins in 1850s California, with Cora Fielding, a young woman determined to study medicine. Her father is a doctor, and her twin brother, Carl, is set to follow in his footsteps despite not wanting to. Although Cora is...

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...

Gap Year by Lindsey Goldstein introduces forty-six-year-old CPA Jane Greenberg, whose life is disrupted when her daughter Liza leaves for a gap year in Spain. Just then, her husband, Clark, confesses that he is having an affair. Distraught, Jane decides to leave everything behind, including...

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....