Self-consciously “phantasmagoric and allegorical,” this ambitious novel revels in a wide-eyed traveler’s surreal trek across all of Africa’s nations. Acquiescing to the outlandish is obligatory in Areg Azatyan’s epic adventure... Read More

A lively and distinctive cast invigorates this biting novel about a midlife, never-married comedian navigating another chance at love. Snappy and obscene, Randy Ross’s novel "The Squid and the Spaceman" lays out the wonders and woes of... Read More

Grandmothers’ lives change when they gather to care for their grieving family members in the moving novel "Little Ships". Grief has an illuminating effect in Sandra Scofield’s affecting multigenerational novel "Little Ships". After... Read More

Illuminating a dystopian landscape with hope and love, Leif Enger’s magnificent novel "I Cheerfully Refuse" follows a grieving bibliophile’s sailing quest across the Great Lakes. Rainy, a bear of a man born in a climate-changed time,... Read More

In prose drenched with awe, Charlie J. Stephens’s tender novel "A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest" takes a child’s perspective on the pains of being poor in rural Oregon. For eight-year-old Smokey, poverty is part of the landscape, just... Read More

In Elaine McCluskey’s novel "The Gift Child", a former news photographer explores her genealogy following a mysterious disappearance. When her cousin, Graham, vanishes, Harriet is drawn back into the orbit of her narcissistic father,... Read More

In Nadine Sander-Green’s insightful literary novel Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit, a college graduate searches for identity in her work and relationships in the harsh, cold landscape of the Yukon. Millicent, fresh out of journalism school,... Read More

Poetic, inventive, and spare, Maria S. Picone’s "This Tenuous Atmosphere" is a meticulous novella about a woman’s search for family and belonging. Asia feels like an outsider in her fantastical outer-space world. Orbiting Earth among... Read More