In Kevlar, Tattoos and Invisible Scars, Matthew West-James gives us a zero-filter look at the mental conflict of coming home from Iraq and feeling like a complete fraud. As an 88M truck driver, he saw combat and earned the medals, yet spent years convincing himself...

In John Wesley Wilson’s Straight to Hell: Memoir of an Ex-Evangelical Pastor, Wilson grows up in rural Alabama inside a world shaped by Pentecostal religion, family violence, poverty, and fear of divine punishment. After becoming a pastor, husband, and father, he spends years trying to...

There is beauty all around us, and it’s soothing. Imagine the stars in the night sky and the gentle sound of the waves. It’s all very calming. In Clare Hollywood’s The Stars and Sea Are in Me, one can feel the simple power of the...

Muriel Finch and The Missing Key by Deborah Erdmann introduces us to Muriel, a sharp-eyed retiree who notices absolutely everything and has zero filters. Her peaceful retirement in Seaglass Cove takes a bizarre turn when a stranger (Norman) wakes up in her flowerbeds smelling like...

Fated by Adeline Bryant is not your typical werewolf romance story. Fated follows a group of young werewolves who are each about to step into their respective roles of power and face the harsh reality that comes along with it. As I read the story,...

In Matt Aynes’ The Novian, Charles Ferguson is a university professor still recovering from imprisonment inside a secret technological experiment. He learns that the Magnus Foundation has established a hidden island in the Pacific where artificial intelligence now directs a plan capable of reshaping civilization....

In Diane Hester’s The Fortress of Us, after her mother dies suddenly in their Adelaide kitchen, eight-year-old Kelsey Haslett moves with her father, Ryan, to rural Port Lincoln, where a tree house becomes the hiding place for Molly, a silent child she has smuggled from...

Time Travel Academy: The Genius List by Reginald Williams is a breakneck sci-fi thriller for fans of time travel. Cindy Sanders is a high school student in Dallas, with the IQ of a genius and a disastrous JROTC record. After solving a time-travel equation, she...

In his memoir Last August, Joe Gulla shares the month he believes will be his mother Mary Ann’s final one at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. Alzheimer’s has brought Mary Ann to the hospice, where ordinary conversation has stopped, yet Joe keeps arriving with the...

If puffins could bake, what would they make? Poppy Puffin’s Pastries by Ruth Amanda is about a pastry shop in Scotland owned by a bird named Poppy Puffin. Through playful rhymes and a bunch of puffin characters, the story introduces a delicious-looking assortment of baked...

The Outside Voice by C. S. Zolondek is a psychological thriller with a twisty plot and a family that implodes with a secret. In spring in Ann Arbor, Michigan, four-year-old hyperlexic Blythe Daye hears voices in her head, and at first, she thinks it is...

The Havana Syndrome: The Malecón Fall is a spy thriller novel by Dirk Marks. When the ambassador for the Kingdom of Tabari, Julius Jumaane, dies under mysterious circumstances in Havana, Cuba, Alex Simba, an intelligence officer, is called upon to solve the mystery. Alex is...

Dwayne E Hackett’s People of Nyame: The Emissary begins in 2495, after descendants of the African Diaspora have built the Umoja Compact across the Nyame Cluster. Ashley Walker, a scholar on Ubuntu, waits for permission to study the Dyson Almond, an alien archive vessel near...

In the literary fiction novel, I Am Danvers by Kate Kaminski, Marie “Danny” Danvers makes a living as a live-in companion inside very wealthy homes. After a job with the Whitaker family ends in accusations, art adviser Ian St. Martin sends her to Los Angeles...

When Amber Black was six years old, she heard the story of Cain and Abel. The story moved her so deeply that she has sought to maintain a close relationship with God ever since. After going through various life experiences, she has come to understand...

The Lord of Records is Adria Sanders’s account as a former skeptic of the metaphysical who begins receiving telepathic teaching from an entity she understands as the guardian of her soul’s Akashic file. The book explains, through her conversations with this being, that human life...

John Malone’s An Ascendant of Kings follows Adofo Abas Akopian, a prince of Akopia who was believed dead after the Carth Dominion shattered his homeland at the Crimson Bluffs. Taken into slavery as a boy, Adofo survives years inside the Dominion’s military order before returning...

Denise Thompson-Slaughter’s memoir Since You Weren’t There & Other Memories charts her personal path through the social landscape of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. She recounts explicit moments such as her teenage uncles shooting rats from a Kenilworth dining-room window, buying Little Golden Books at...

Every family has a story of courage somewhere in its past. For the Swarts, theirs begins in 1912 in the Netherlands. Inspired by the experiences of the author's own ancestors, eight-year-old Helena Swart is at the center of it all in Penny S. Ledbetter's De...

Matthew West-James’s Burning Salt begins with the Jaka, an ancient civilization that has learned to cross between universes through the Nexus after earlier expansion nearly destroyed them. When a rupture starts sending three-dimensional matter into a planar universe, every crossing tears through the two-dimensional environment...