My Sister’s Quilt by Janet K. Shawgo is a collection of interconnected short stories that use quilts as both objects and narrative bridges. The story centers on two sisters, Lillian and Violet Claridge, whose childhood in an English noble household is shaped by contrasting dreams....

Mariya is the first book in the Empty Mankind series by Milha Vek. Mariya grows up feeling abandoned by her father after he leaves the family for another man. This leaves Mariya with a hollow and empty ache in her chest. The Russians called this...

J. Timothy Damiani’s The Dementia Diaries examines the complexities of love and loss through the eyes of a psychiatrist grappling with early-onset dementia. The story follows Dr. Will Newman as he moves from a prestigious academic career to a role at F.R.E.S.H., a state mental...

Paolo G. Grossi’s The Kaminsky Symphony is a riveting and compelling novel that begins in 1913, in Italy, and continues through the political upheavals in Russia in 1917, and briefly through WWI. The principal character is Maestro Carlo Alberto Mandelli, Count of Castagnino, Milan. In...

After the Quiet: Stories to the Edge and Back by Carl Lakeland is a tightly constructed collection that examines moments when ordinary lives brush up against violence, moral fracture, and irrevocable choice. Across its interconnected stories, the book moves through intelligence work, personal loss, and...

In The Lost Ballerina by Deanna Lynn Sletten, seventeen-year-old Maddie Carlson needs to earn money fast. Her boyfriend, Caden, crashed her car, and her father insists she pay for the repairs herself. Maddie takes a job mowing and weeding the lawn at a big, mysterious...

Runika “Run” Long, a young woman born and raised in the Lower East Side of New York, knew what it felt like to exist and not be seen and heard. It was the reason she had chosen life in foster care over one with her...

In Smoky Blue Sunrise by Lucille Guarino, Jolie-Mae Buckley leaves her South Carolina hometown in the aftermath of her sister Katy-June's death in a car accident. Jolie takes a live-in nanny position with Amanda and Jesse, a physician and an attorney with two young children...

In Power There's Silence by Adam N. Dix starts when Billy White stepped into Trina Rose’s cantina. After a while, Billy proposed to Trina, and a year later, their son, Blythe, was born. When Blythe was eight years old, Billy drove away toward the big...

Luna and Mark had been married for seven years when he suddenly said he no longer loved her. What follows is the dissolution of the marriage, which devastates Luna. She feels empty and lost, having done everything to make her marriage work. During the packing...