Craig Brown’s Dignity follows an unnamed boy in Petone, New Zealand, who first approaches Malcolm Beaumont, the council binman everyone calls Bogie, after classmates dare him to steal the man’s Coke. What begins as a childish test turns into an unlikely attachment, formed on a...

Samuel Colabufo’s The Mitigator centers on Joseph "Goody" Goodness, a man who carries a deep psychological scar from his childhood that manifests as an intuitive radar for tracking human rage. When he senses someone about to snap, he moves in to intercept the violence before...

The Big Picture by Pat Ferns follows the Canadian television producer from a childhood shaped by his family’s move from Winnipeg to England to his return to Canada in 1968, when a chance CBC appointment brings him into national current affairs broadcasting. Ferns learns television...

Ben Reinking’s How to Relax Without Losing Your Edge is a self-help guide that begins with high-functioning anxiety, the kind of worry that can look like achievement from the outside while keeping a person in overdrive inside. Reinking writes as a physician and as someone...

As the archivist with the Foundling Historical Society and Museum, Wrenn Grayson is employed to restore the mansion to its 19th-century original state as much as possible. The original owner of the mansion – a millionaire industrialist – prohibited the destruction of any family history...

In Keith Thorn’s Worth the Trade, time is the currency behind every decision. Thorn begins with money because it is the cost people count, then changes the question from what a thing costs to what it asks of a life. A possession has a receipt,...

Edd Ahearn's In the Shadow of Beauty takes readers to the Yorkshire village of Norton, as veteran Tomasz “Ski” Bankowski enters a burning tradesmen’s office, where electrician Ben Carmichael lies dead beside scattered diamonds. After Ski rescues injured plasterer Aiden Anson, he learns that the...

The Secret of the Smiling Rock Man by Joe Cappello is a collection of 14 short stories that readers will enjoy. All the stories are built around characters his father used to describe as having “rocks in their heads,” people who refuse to settle for...

Edmond Thornfield’s Atalanta of the Wild follows Atalanta, an Arkadian huntress raised in the mountain wilds, after the father who abandoned her returns seeking forgiveness. Lord Iásios invites her into the royal house of Tegea, where she meets siblings she once believed she would never...

In Kritanut Wattana’s Six Days Out, six days before his scheduled release from Ashford Correctional, structural engineer Ethan Cole watches a mysterious illness tear through the prison and escape into a country where systems have collapsed. He sets out for Harlow, two hundred and ten...

Bernard Doucette’s The Seasonal Killer opens with retired Brett Dubois agreeing to tell journalist Monroe Jackson what happened in New Valley during the summer of 1981. At twelve, Brett spent his days roaming the suburban woods with four close friends who called themselves the Subpar...

In Kris Paulsen's Galaxy Walkers 2: Unity of Worlds, Lyra and Archie are Universe Walkers, humans whose awakened minds let them cross galaxies using extraordinary abilities. Their enemy, Saros, is a Walker who is Archie’s presumed-dead mother. Archie builds a device intended to stop her...

Kritanut Wattana’s After Us follows Owen, a programmer living in a near-future where artificial intelligence has become part of everyday life. Recently laid off and separated from Jordana and their child, Rowan, Owen is alone in his apartment when every screen delivers the same order:...

“Sometimes being unschooled is an advantage in art: you have more freedom to unlock your emotions . . . to not know when you’ve crossed a boundary that probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” Boundaries fade in Vaulted Night (A Novella of...

In Bound Maiden: Daphne’s Chase by Eva Darcy, we meet a nineteen-year-old river nymph who resolutely turns her back on marriage to live a wild life in the woods. Daphne’s unwavering devotion to Artemis becomes her guiding light until a Titan-blooded basilisk begins terrorizing Arkady,...

In Forward Only, David Watson recounts growing up in Texas with his grandparents, Grandma and Pawpaw, whose home gave him his first sense of belonging. Losing Pawpaw at twelve changes that home, and adolescence is marked by a habit of leaving whenever he cannot see...

Hadley is hungry, and her rumbling tummy won't let her rest until she finds something to fill it. Hadley the Hippo Is What She Eats by Kayla E. Green follows her through the jungle as she munches her way from one snack to the next,...