Ranya was a British-Bangladeshi who endured hell with her parents. She moved to her brother’s home in London, and life wasn’t any better. Ranya lived each day by rules that would break the strongest person. She had just started the first year of her academic...

Sutra of the Pearl: A Journey to India; a Path to Forgiveness by Lee Kaiser is a contemporary fiction novel that follows its female protagonist, Julie Paglia, to India in the hope of finding ancient texts. Julie's goal is pretty straightforward except for one minor...

Someone’s Kid by Patti Carpenter opens with Jesse in the throes of an overdose. The description is as real as it gets. Patti knows what she is talking about. I would be surprised if the first few pages do not grab you. From the opening...

Saltwater and Driftwood by Anna J. Walner is a historical fiction drama that follows a young girl and her family's ordeal during one of the worst natural disasters on US soil, The Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900. While rummaging through her grandmother Clara's stuff after...

A mother who religiously sticks to her stringent personal morning routine. A jogger running away from herself. Three fresh graduates meet an untimely fate. A girl has an accident after taking a dare to impress her crush. These are some of the fascinating scenarios in...

San Francisco is a collection of 11 short stories by Terence Clarke. "Eugene Li and The Queen of England" follows a Chinese American police officer as he is searching for the kidnapped granddaughter of an Irishman in Chinatown. In "The Only Playboy," two lead actors...

Spindrift Love is a young adult coming-of-age novel by Jocelyn Holst Bolster. Fifteen-year-old Jesse grew up in an ultra-orthodox home with a minister for a father in rural Kansas. Devoid of distractions like rock music or television, Jesse spends her days admiring nature and its...

We meet a seventy-eight-year-old woman named Edna O’Hare in Shadows by Peter J. Manos. Her husband, James Hashimoto, died almost a year ago. He was born in Hiroshima and was only two years old when the bomb went off. Edna has nightmares about nuclear war,...

Sleeping with Cancer is a contemporary slice-of-life drama novel by Phillip Riley. Emily's life turns upside down when she witnesses her former boyfriend and a Chinese man dying in a shootout at her apartment, leaving 1.2 million dollars in a duffle bag. Trying to ignore...

Slade by Robb Grindstaff is a unique attempt, using an unusual style and format, to pinpoint and highlight both the light and dark sides of the human psyche. Written as a series of interviews, the story focuses on the incredible survival and life story of...