'I remember you once told me about mockingbirds and their special talents for mimicry. They steal the songs from others, you said. I want to ask you this- how were our own songs stolen from us, the notes dispersed, while our faces were turned away?'
Berlin, 1936. Ernst Sch fer, a young, ambitious zoologist and keen hunter and collector, has come to the attention of Heinrich Himmler, who invites him to lead a group of SS scientists to the frozen mountains of Tibet. Their secret mission- to search for the origins of the Aryan race. Ernst has doubts initially, but soon seizes the opportunity to rise through the ranks of the Third Reich.
While Ernst prepares for the trip, he marries Herta, his childhood sweetheart. But Herta, a flautist who refuses to play from the songbook of womanhood and marriage under the Reich, grows increasingly suspicious of Ernst and his expedition.
Finalist - Fiction: Literary 2019 Best Book Awards
Kate, a somewhat clumsy widow of thirty-two, flees her stifling hometown on Vancouver Island to live alone on an even smaller island in the Salish Sea. In so doing, she has vague expectations of solace and sanctuary, despite past experience. Instead she meets Ivy, a woman who through their conversations transports her to the intoxicating world of 1926 Cuba. Within the context of their friendship, Ivy's past begins to unravel from a long-held silence, just as Kate finds herself confronting her relationship with the colourful community she's known all her life, along with an unexpected visitor who threatens to remove all peace from her chosen refuge. Told from the perspectives of three narrators: Ivy, Kate, and Kate's mother Nora, FISHING FOR BIRDS is a novel that juxtaposes the expectations we cling to so fiercely and the unexpected and sometimes unconventional things that turn up. The novel challenges traditional constructs of time, ethnicity, and relationship. Set against the tropical beauty of 1920s Cuba and the Northwest Coast of contemporary time, both the landscape and unique character of island life underscore the experiences of three very different women.
Finalist - Fiction: Literary 2019 Best Book Awards
Abbie Rose Stone’s acquired wisdom runs deep, and so do her scars. She has successfully navigated the shoals of a long marriage, infertility, challenging children, and a career. Now it’s her turn to realize her dream: producing hard apple cider along the northern shores of Lake Michigan that she loves. She manages to resist new versions of the old pull of family dynamics that threaten to derail her plan—but nothing can protect her from the shock a lovely young stranger delivers when she exposes a long-held secret. In the wake of this revelation, Abbie must overcome circumstances that severely test her self-determination, her loyalties, and her understanding of what constitutes true family.
Finalist - Fiction: Literary 2019 Best Book Awards
Exasperated by the small-minded tyranny of his hometown, Skyler Faralan travels to Southeast Asia with $500 and a death wish. After months of wandering, he crosses paths with other dejected travelers: Sophea, a short-fused NGO worker; Arthur, a brazen expat abandoned by his wife and son; and Winston, a defiant intellectual exile. Bound by pleasure-fueled self-destruction, the group flounders from one Asian city to another, confronting the mixture of grief, betrayal, and discrimination that caused them to travel in the first place.
“Guillermo tells the stories of American expatriates seeking to lose or remake themselves in the far-flung corners of Asia. His narrative voice—steady, visual, and evocative—is complemented by his keen ear for dialogue.”—Peter Bacho, author of Cebu and winner of the American Book Award
Finalist - Fiction: Literary 2019 Best Book Awards
In a world so full of lonely people and broken hearts, Chris Hawkins, a black sound engineer from Chicago’s south side, and Sidonie Frame—white, suburban-raised, the head manager of one of the city’s most elite venues—meet by work-related happenstance and fall quickly in love, convinced that by that act alone they can inspire peace, joy, and happiness in the world around them. The world, however, has other ideas.
Their meeting is serendipitous. Chris, who owns and runs his company, largely spends his time surrounded by members of his own community; Sidonie, conversely, is rarely outside the environs of work and its predominantly white staff and clientele. But when the club’s sound manager goes AWOL on the night of a big event and Chris is hired to come in as a last-minute replacement, their destinies collide.
Finalist - Fiction: Literary 2019 Best Book Awards
It’s the Midwest in the 1970-80s, and Mary is growing up in Detroit, where the recession hits hard, and jobs are scarce. In a set of linked stories, Mary tries to conjure the spirits of protection to confront economic struggle, violence, addiction, and death. Mary moves to cities across the Midwest looking for work, all the while learning the healing power of dignity from the true patrons: her community of friends and family who teach her to love better, live fuller, and question power. An ode to the creative spirit’s ability to transcend hardship, The Patron Saint of Lost Girls paints an unflinching portrait of women’s resilience in the face of injustice.
Finalist - Fiction: Literary 2019 Best Book Awards
Murder comes to a remote fishing village. No one can imagine who he is or where he came from when the killer is caught and beaten unconscious. When he wakes, he can’t remember who he is or why he is there, sending the village into chaos and uncertainty. After an age-old ritual, the killer is handed over to a young orphaned woman living on the edge of the village. Taska Valimer is deemed his keeper for a lifetime. As secrets are revealed and the villagers begin to fear the killer will turn on them all, humanity, trust, and the darkest of human nature converge. All the villagers must face the coming darkness and with it comes treachery, deceit, intrigue, and hope.
"If you aren't already 'woke, ' you will be after reading this book."--Mary Batten, author of Aliens from Earth
EVAN WALLS IS TERRIFIED by the birth of his first child because he doesn't want her to suffer the isolation he had as a child. Seeing his torment, his wife, Izzy, prods him to explain. He tells of being a black child growing up in the racially charged 1960s. Inspired to overcome the racism and class status imposed on blacks, he dreams of a life bigger than that lived by most everyone he knows in the small Virginia town of Canaan. He is resented by friends and family for desiring a life better than theirs. Among the smartest in his class, Evan becomes a target of white kids threatened by the forced integration of their schools. Caught in a crossfire of hate from whites and his own people, who question whether he is black enough, Evan is often alone and bewildered. Only the love of his great grandmother, Mama Jennie, and his mentor, Bojack, keeps him on track. Together, they help Evan find perspective and peace.
Who is it we love and why do we love these people? Toward the end of her life, Judith asks these questions, trying to understand why she chose Elliot Pine to love. Why, for sixty years, did she persist in loving someone who never gave as much as he was given? In her quest for understanding, she writes her story to this exceptional man. Meeting as children in Chicago, they move to opposite coasts. Elliot embarks on a remarkable legal career in Washington and New York while Judith raises her children alone in California, after tragedy. Coming together again and again throughout their lives, their love is never equal, Elliot defining the terms of the relationship.
When Nila comes to America, she ventures to this strange land on a dependent visa, a wife in an arranged marriage she had no control over. Now faceless in a lonely world, she drifts amongst the clouds and people, learning a culture she never expected while desperately trying to hold on to her own. There is sorrow and joy, adventure, and loss, but above all, there is love.
Written from the heart and mind of the displaced, Nila’s story explores what it means to be a voyager through the unknown, an immigrant in a land of immigrants, each vying for a place and a home. It speaks to a connection while baring the soul of the global society we have created.
Culture, assimilation, love, and pain all come together in a lyrical wonder that will make you cry, warm your heart, and stir your soul… one that will stay with you long after the final page is closed.
Susan Tepper's new novel is a picaresque romp. A Gulf War vet battling PTSD is tricked into chauffeuring millionaire country music legend Billy Bud Wilcox from Newark to Colorado. Everything goes wrong. Tepper expertly skewers a vast collection of characters on a wildly entertaining road trip from hell.
Ever since a childhood tragedy bonded Jessica Jensen to Oregon’s mighty Nesika River, she has seen herself as its guardian. Now a courageous field biologist, she has just finished gathering scientific evidence that could bring about the dismantling of the massive hydro dam that threatens to destroy her river. But then she discovers that her boss is suppressing her scientific evidence—leaving the dam’s fate at the mercy of a far-reaching corporate conspiracy—and she falls into a current of loss and desperation.
As Jess’s life spirals out of control, she mysteriously starts to make contact with Piah, a member of the Native American Molalla tribe who lived on the riverbanks of the Nesika two hundred years before Jess. Piah, too, faces a terrible threat that could destroy all that’s left of her world. As the veil between their two worlds begins to lift, each woman learns important lessons from the other about how to love, and to rekindle their faith in the future—even in the face of tragic loss and uncertainty.
In the early 1900s, the Mafia controls much of Sicily, the government is corrupt, and taxes are exorbitant. As a result of the terrible conditions and the limits of their crops, Tomas and Katerina are forced to send their three grown sons and their grandchildren to live in America.
It is a heart-breaking split: grandparents forced to say goodbye to grandchildren knowing they will likely never see them again. Parents and sons splitting from each other. Paolo and Gianna, their two young children and the two younger brothers endure a painful farewell to the people, the farm and the life they love.
They arrive in Chicago on Christmas Day, 1917. The sprawling, dirty city is not like anything they could have imagined or dreamed. The family moves into a fourth floor apartment in a run-down tenement building on Cambridge Street in the Little Sicily section of town. Called Little Hell in the papers, the slum neighborhood deserved the title.
In the summer of 1955, nine-year-old Amanda Gerber tearfully leaves her best friend, Francine, and their adventurous life on her block in Brooklyn’s Flatbush. She joins her cantankerous family on the long, hot drive to her grandmother’s home in the Catskill Mountains among the city’s Jews who flock to countless hotels and bungalow colonies in the heyday of the Borscht Belt. In the idyllic mountains, Amanda becomes ensconced in the tumult of her extended family and their friends, often seeking solace in the woods with her beloved cousin Laura.
Through the following summers, interspersed with the heightened drama of her emotionally charged city life, Mandy faces severe tests to her survival mechanisms, including the pain of loss, abuse, and betrayal, while family secrets threaten to disrupt her life even further. A novel-in-stories, Floating in the Neversink is a testament to the power of survival, friendship, and love.
Glen Kinsella has just finished opening all his high school graduation cards proclaiming him to be on the doorstep of an exciting life. But as the summer of 1970 begins, Glen is living with his deluded grandfather and an array of desperate residents in a Midwestern prairie town that has withered to near-extinction – a town populated primarily by the sagging shells of long abandoned houses.
Hope is not one of Glen’s traits. In high school, he was known as the retard’s brother. He never had a date, nor even tried to be on speaking terms with someone as sophisticated as Suzanne. But as his grandfather always said, anything is possible in Corcoran. And in the summer of 1970, that prediction appears to be finally coming true.
What is it we cannot hold in our hands that holds us like a fist? This is the question that June, Reni and Sandy must answer. Each of them only wants to return to college to study and write poetry, but the circumstances of their lives make this impossible. Set in 1980s Chicago, June, a trophy wife, denies her future by submerging herself in domestic life as she tries to repair a damaged and dangerous marriage. Reni, embracing her anger, decides becoming a call girl is both her fate and a fast-track to earning tuition and living independently. Sandy, a factory worker, falls deeply in love with an eccentric young artist who promises to return her to a time of unadulterated innocence. With each turn through tragic loss and increasing silence, they slowly realize that it is that very silence they've been burdened to keep that prevents them not only from realizing their hopes, but the possibility of any meaningful existence. Sentencing Silence, a 2019 National Indie Excellence Award Finalist in Literary Fiction, takes the reader on a journey of self-discovery toward breaking the silence inherent in rape culture and sexual abuse that holds its survivors captive in the traumatic pasts that thwart their dreams.
Fourteen-year-old Jake Parker discovers an old ship's lantern that grants him three wishes. The local news captures the moment Jake makes his second wish--so now everyone on the planet knows that Jake has one more wish for anything at all, and it will come true. Public opinion, the media, government agents, crooked politicians, and his own family are soon pressuring Jake hard to make a wish that benefits them.
Liberal-minded adults and teens alike will love Mark Scott Piper's debut novel, You Wish. Brimming with magical realism, social satire, and wry humor, Jake's story is about much more than the plight of one teenager. It's about the power that anyone, young or old, has to truly benefit humanity--even if it means outsmarting everyone else to do it.
Lizzi Young lives in a small New England town with her husband, two teenage sons, and four dogs. At forty-four years old she finds herself living the life she dreamed of, but something has been stirring beneath the foundation of safety and security on which she has built her life and family. A passing spring storm reveals a hole in her beautiful backyard, and Lizzi begins to question the solid foundation she has depended on all these years. Roots from a large oak tree, cut down several years earlier, have finally disintegrated, collapsing within and exposing the past devastation to the light of day.
This discovery comes on the heels of her extended family becoming bitter and estranged after the death of her grandmother, Gigi, three years earlier. As they attempt to drag her into the latest family saga that creates a clear divide in the ones she loves, it quickly becomes the most difficult decision she has ever had to make.
"A deeply moving multi-themed literary tale of a beloved, heroic dog, a woman with a dark and joyless history with dogs, and a ruthless feral pack with its own ideas about life and redemption." —The Oregon Coast, 1992-2005
Tracy has a dark and complicated history with dogs. She must confront her past when her new committed partner presses her to bring a rescue dog into their lives. A collage of memories raises feelings of guilt and loss regarding both her early life experiences, and about Feargus, a dog with whom she had once been acquainted, and who continues to haunt her thoughts.
Feargus’ life is unveiled in vivid and fascinating detail. He enjoys a rich but unstable early life and is at times subject to neglect and abuse, but his strength and integrity lead him to a life of faithfulness and heroism.
Ariel was one of a kind—musically talented, sensitive, idealistic, and wildly creative. She flitted from one man to the next like the proverbial butterfly in a field of wildflowers, tasting this one and that, never staying long before fluttering off to the next, relishing her freedom and being her authentic self. Then she met Trent, an immensely talented piano technician—genteel, witty, endearingly self-effacing— her counterpart in every way. She could see herself clipping her wings to grow roots, and did everything in her power to make that happen. But things aren’t always as they seem, and Ariel hadn’t counted on navigating the hall of mirrors of Trent’s carefully constructed façade. Could she be the woman he needed to find himself again, or had he slid too far down the rabbit hole of tortured self-loathing? Wrapped in a symphony of high notes and lows, accents and rests, arpeggios and harmonics, their performance is about empathy, devotion, duplicity, heartbreak, and letting go.
It is 1970, and Angel is a desperado who despises rules and authority above all else, with the possible exception of cruelty towards women. While inhabiting a world attempting to recover from student riots, Angelwho is exhausted by the sheer volume and rancor of political discoursedecides to turn to his two favorite things: literature and women.
As Angel chases love on the campus of Dartmouth, he finds that the most astounding movement of the sixties was not civil rights or antiwar clamor, but instead, it is the liberation of women. While attempting to merge his passions into a single orb, Angelwho has somehow become a cross between an accidental playboy and literary nerdsometimes succeeds gloriously. Other times, not so much. As he moves from bedroom to classroom and classroom to bedroom, Angel smokes weed with the hope of gaining clarity. But as time goes on, Angel cannot help but wonder if he will ever be able to view the world from a womans perspective or whether he will go down in flames as a fortuitous playboy who never determined the difference between lust and love.
