Search results for ""Regal House Publishing""

Everything has been hidden from Roxanne G.—her birth name, her sister, her family history—until her “boyfriend” tries to ingratiate himself by flying in her estranged mother from Tel Aviv. That visit is the start of a tumultuous journey, in which she first learns about a profoundly disabled sister who lives in a residential community in the Galilee and later begins to unearth disturbing long-held family secrets. The process of facing this history and acknowledging the ways she’s been shaped by it will enable Roxanne to forge the kinds of meaningful connections that had for so long been elusive. In this way, The Face Tells the Secret is the story about a woman who finds love and learns how to open herself to its pleasures. The Face Tells the Secret is also a story that explores disability from many angles and raises questions about our responsibility to care for our kin. How far should Roxanne go to care for the wounded people in her life—her mother, her sister, the man who professes undying love? What should she take on? When is it necessary to turn away from someone’s suffering?

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We Refugees is the third anthology in a series designed to spark conversation, promote awareness, and generate funds to advance social justice and amplify the voices of the marginalized. Rather than the vision of crisis so often portrayed in the media, the poems, essays, and personal reflections in We Refugees are moving accounts of individual suffering and fortitude; demonstrations of the great willingness shared by many to bridge cultural divides and offer hope and healing; and celebrations of the courage of people who have been forced to leave their homes and seek new ones. The contributors are Kirsty Anantharajah, Jennifer deBie, Nina Foushee, Robbie Gamble, Akuol Garang, Sharif Gemie, Steven Jakobi, Enesa Mahmic, Loretta Oleck, Virginia Ryan, Judith Skillman, and Mitchell Toews. Pact Press is proud, through the sale of this anthology, to support the work of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC), which advocates for, empowers, and provides material support to people seeking asylum.

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The Greaves family is the pillar of Germantown, a small South Carolina community that nestles in the folds of the Appalachian Mountains. Richard and Clara Greaves live in a stone manor paid for by the bank Richard founded three decades ago. Their oldest son, Jack, is the high school athletic director, their daughter, Emily, the county solicitor. Their youngest son, Tom, is a former champion on American Ninja. Their lives appear charmed, at least until the October weekend when they begin to unravel, quickly and publicly. In the wake of shady business transactions, a floundering marriage, and Tom's new Leonard Cohen tattoo the Greaves are so harried no one seems to have realized the family matriarch has suffered a stroke. Into this chaos comes Nayma, a young Mexican-American woman in a very white town, lonely Elvis, war veteran and high school groundskeeper, and Dr. Elias Agnew, a high school teacher existing behind a facade of dissimulation all of whom challenge traditional notions of

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"A must-read for anyone who has ever fought their own battles with both fitting in and being themselves." ~Shannon Schuren, author of Where Echoes LieSmart and athletic, Ben Snyder is ready for middle school. But his super picky eating, which has never been a big deal before, is about to take him down. Suddenly everybody’s on his case about what he’s eating and what he’s not—his old friends, his new friends, his weird lab partner, the girl he’s crushing on, and a bully—and Ben finds himself in social free fall, sliding toward the bottom of the middle school food chain. Even worse, there’s an upcoming three-day class trip to a colonial campsite. Knowing he can’t handle the gag-worthy menu, Ben prepares for the outing like it’s a survival mission. Armed with new and unexpected information about his eating habits that could change everything, he sets out with three tactical goals: impress the girl, outsmart the bully, and avoid every single meal. But when his plans go sideways and epic hunger threatens to push him over the edge, Ben must decide how far he will go to fit in and if he has the courage to stand out.

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The poems in this first collection move through the arc of a life, with a tender focus on the landscape of childhood and the natural world. A young child’s delight in language—'derelict and delectation...onyx and obsidian'— matures to contemplate what language, myth, and art can teach us about inevitable loss: of a home the child, her mother, and sisters were forced by a troubled father to flee; of aunts, uncles, and that mother who had once seemed eternal. Woven into this narrative, the title character—a nomadic woman who lives without money—appears with her porcelain begging bowl, a figure from myth, a touchstone for what is everlasting, a moment of transcendence into a more benevolent world, the one glimpsed again and again in these poems.

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Felix is an 8-year-old boy with a debilitating condition, stuck from birth in a terrifying group home. He and his fellow "freaks"—wheelchair-bound Mila, dermatologically-challenged Klaus, and lethargic Elsa—suffer at the hands of their able-bodied fellow orphans and the cruel, disciplinarian taskmaster called The Wolf. 10 years later, 18-year-old Felix is on the verge of being discharged into the real world when Annika, the flame-haired, fire-eyed rich girl from the mansion across the way blows into the orphanage, upsetting norms, destroying plans, and exposing the very real danger all the kids are in at the hands of an evil genius and his un-killable right hand, whose sinister plans for the Freaks reach back to history’s most horrific crimes.

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How does a mother survive the unsurvivable? After her husband and the baby's nurse kidnap her infant son, Nicholas, and take him back to their native Germany, Julia Kruse must completely rebuild her life in America. The Lost Son chronicles Julia's journey from Depression-Era Queens, NY through World War II as she struggles to provide for herself and her remaining son, Johannes. Over the years, her search for Nicholas is thwarted at every turn, until she falls in love with chauffeur Paul Burns, whose boss might have the political connections to find her son and bring him home from the German front during the last days of the Third Reich, where Johannes is also fighting for the Allies.

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Ignored yet again by his crush, Abe Pearlman wanders into Fortunes and Futures for a little diversion. The fortune teller reveals that Abe may be able to save someone’s life. But before he can ask any questions, he’s swept to the slums of Victorian London, where he finds that his crush, Mitzy Singer, has also been banished. Abe and Mitzy soon discover that they’ve been plunked down in the middle of the Jack the Ripper spree. To get back home, they’ll have to work together to figure out how the fortune teller’s prophecy is connected to one of history’s most notorious criminal cases. They’ll also have to survive the outpouring of hate toward Jewish refugees that the Ripper murders triggered. Ripped Away is based on real historical events, including the Ripper crimes, the inquests, and the accusations against immigrants.

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It is impossible not to root for Ceti, almost fifteen, who tells her story of growing up in shelters, learning soccer from her Gramps, and sleeping in her Mom’s red truck where they listened over and over to Rolling Stones discs someone left behind. Following in the steps of her hero, Lionel Messi, Ceti is a shooting star on the field. A U.S. scout is coming to watch her play in the State Championship; she has Ruby, her best friend since kindergarten rooting for her, and a crush on a boy who lives in her building, Will. But at home, she’ll find a spoon in the sink, a ball of tin foil and a needle in the trash. Her Mom, who used to be beautiful with her long honey hair and green eyes is now wasted and track-marked. And she is pregnant. Ceti’s life goes up and down with a mother who wants only the next high. Her Mom’s menacing and goofy boyfriend Foxface is always hounding Ceti; their junky friends start a fire in Ceti’s apartment; and on the day of the semifinals, Ceti finds her Mom bleeding profusely. She steals a new iPhone for her Mom but is caught and disqualified from playing in the Championship game. Then Ruby decides on private school for next year, and Will stops hanging out with Ceti. When her Mom promises they can start over in New Hampshire, Ceti is hopeful. Instead, she finds her Mom has overdosed. Ceti, too, would be one more dream slipping away if she didn’t have the courage to hold on to what she loves the most.

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The evening of April 12,1979 was clear and warm. Unaware of the danger lurking on the periphery of the French Quarter, Drs. Ronald Banks and John Hakola made a tragic decision - to walk the few blocks from the historic district to the Hyatt Regency. Inches from the safety of their hotel entrance they were accosted by two young men - a scuffle ensued, a shot fired, Dr. Banks lay dead on the sidewalk. Fighting Time tells the story of what happened next - hours, days, weeks and years after those horrible seconds. Isaac Knapper, a sixteen-year-old boy from a nearby housing project was wrongfully convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola. As the time passed, Amy, Dr. Banks's middle daughter and now a psychiatrist and trauma specialist, realized it was time to unpack her own family trauma. When Isaac was exonerated and released from prison, Amy traveled to New Orleans to meet the man wrongfully convicted of killing their father. FIGHTING TIME is the powerful true story of two families whose lives became entangled in a moment of trauma and is told with empathy, vulnerability, and grace.

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Pact Press brings you Changing Tides, the fourth anthology in a series designed to spark conversation, promote awareness, and generate funds to advance social and environmental justice and amplify the voices of the marginalized. The poems, essays, and personal reflections in Changing Tides detail moving accounts of the human impact on our ocean environment and demonstrate the heightened need for individual, community, and global action in addressing what has become a collective crisis for life on this blue planet. Pact Press is proud, through the sale of this anthology, to support the work of the Coral Restoration Foundation™, a 501 3 (c) non-profit organization that was founded in 2007 in response to the widespread loss of the dominant coral species on the Florida Reef Tract. Coral Restoration Foundation™ (CRF) now manages the largest coral restoration program in the world. The contributors include Jared Benjamin, Susan Bruce, Kersten Christianson, Lorraine Jeffrey, Olivia Kingery, Liberty Lawson, Jayne Marek, Anthony Panegyres, Gerard Sarnat, Christina Stefan, Franciszka Voeltz, Tonya Wiley, Juliet Wilson, Sheree Winslow, and Mandy-Suzanne Wong.

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Girlz in the Hood is the unsentimental, moving, and surprisingly humorous account of a girl and her ten siblings who grew up in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Mary's mother was a fierce matriarch, a single mom who raised eleven children with the help of welfare checks and a fire arm hidden in her bra. Drugs, guns, and pregnancies were everyday occurrences, but Mary and her siblings took it all in stride, spying on the grown-ups, playing in the streets, and helping to take care of the new babies when they were born. The dubious yet colorful cast of characters that came into their lives (the Jehovah Witnesses, the whores, the addicts, the "fathers"), and the never-ending series of hardships (the jail terms, the knife fights, the mental illness, and homicides), couldn't shake the core of the family. This is the story of Mary, but, even more so, it's the story of her mother, a uniquely strong and extraordinary woman who was able to survive moments of pain and disappointment by laughing at the comedy of human missteps, miscalculations, and downright stupidity. This is also a story about race and of poverty and how, over time, it can wear you down and destroy you, because, although Mary got out okay, her sisters and brothers were not so lucky.

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A most remarkable house, a most remarkable family—with secrets. The fabulous Redmaynes seem able to live every day in three cities at once: London, Paris and New York. Somehow. The three lucky Redmayne children—George, Felice, and Emile—believe they know all about their extraordinary house and its many secrets. But, alas, no, they do not. And when they begin to investigate, disaster strikes: George and Felice accidentally misplace their younger brother in time, with the result that the entire family must unite to find the poor lad and bring him home. A whirlwind plot ensues that involves Shakespeare, a ship’s monkey, a packet of M&Ms, a red pen, and one or two, erm, unfortunate changes to history. Can it all ever be put right? As it turns out, on this occasion, maybe not… All actions have consequences, Mr Redmayne remarks towards the close of this tale, and it may be that the Redmaynes must live with theirs. Forever. Simultaneously a rip-roaring adventure through time and space and the story of a family—and more specifically, about what makes for a happy family—this prize-winning novel will entertain and delight young adult readers of all ages.

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In this stylish and gripping historical noir novel, Randall Harker—the controversial city editor of an established progressive daily in the urban Midwest of 1950—excites the wrath of a reckless, corrupt, and ambitious U.S. senator anxious to make a name for himself as the country's most ardent anti-Communist. Decidedly flawed and afflicted by personal demons and political foes, Harker finds himself abandoned by friends and colleagues as he loses his wife, his reputation, and his job. He also finds himself losing the very sense of his own identity. With its gritty realism and dead-on period detail, the elegant prose of Estranged renders the rough-and-tumble world of mid-century journalism, the historical post-war battle between the Mob and trade unions, and the tender, intimate, and sensual moments of Harker’s desperate romantic escape from the nightmare that his personal and professional life has become.

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Eleven-year-old Reeni’s world is changing. Her star-of-the-senior-class, college-bound sister has no time for her, sixth grade is full of girls into makeup and diets and crushes, and something deep inside tells Reeni it’s time to become more than a shy girl in the shadows. But when she commits to dancing a solo for her retiring ballet teacher’s final recital, her lifelong fear of performing expands along with her newly-changing body. Lunch friends convince Reeni that a diet will give her courage and self-confidence, but the diet wreaks havoc with Reeni’s life. She lies to her parents, breaks up with her best friend, and loses focus on school work and dance. Reeni faces a painful choice: should she break her commitment to solo and quit dance? Or might she have hidden strengths that could help her come out of the shadows and become the girl she wants to be?

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Father Thomas Abernathy brings together a wellborn Methodist minister, a dogmatic Lutheran pastor, and an enigmatic, evangelical preacher. Father Tom soon finds the Lutheran pastor Rev. Theo Swindberg assuming a preternatural place in his life. The man is nervous and doleful, and to learn what makes him tick, Father Tom attends a service at the Lutheran Church, where he falls under the spell of the pastor’s wife, Naomi. When Naomi is diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, Swindberg calls upon Father Tom to pray over her healing, a request which could be a career-ending departure from Father Tom’s church’s tenets. Father Tom struggles with his feelings for Naomi, and when he reluctantly agrees to Swindberg’s request, he also finds himself struggling with his faith. In the end it is faith, hope, and love that renews them all.

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When her village in Albion is sacked by the Roman general Vespasian, young Aislin is left without home and family. Determined to exact revenge, she travels to Rome, a sprawling city of wealth, decadence, and power. A “barbarian” in a “civilized” world, Aislin struggles to comprehend Roman ways. From a precarious hand-to-mouth existence on the streets, she becomes the mistress of a wealthy senator, but their child Faolan is born with a disability that renders him unworthy of life in the eyes of his father and other Romans. Imprisoned for her efforts to topple the Roman regime, Aislin learns of an alternate philosophy from her cellmate, the Judean known today as the apostle St. Paul. As the capital burns in the Great Fire of 64 AD, he bequeaths to her a mission that will take her to Jerusalem. There, Yohanan, son of Zakkai, has been striving to preserve the tradition of Hillel against the Zealots who advocate for a war of independence. Responding to the Judeans’ revolt, the Romans—again under the leadership of Vespasian—besiege Jerusalem, destroying the Second Temple and with it, the brand of Judean monotheism it represents. Yohanan takes on the mission of preserving what can be preserved, and of reinventing what must be reinvented.

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Women have been successfully fighting in combat roles since the beginning of time. During Michael G. Lewis's research, he discovered women warriors in nearly every century, country, and culture. Their differences are many —some were queens, some prostitutes, some fought for country, others for religion, while others were motivated by blind loyalty, bloodlust, fame, revenge, and even plain old fashioned greed. Yes, their differences are many, but they are more defined by striking similarities—all were smart, stubborn, almost supernaturally brave, and extraordinary. Their stories are inspiring but also chilling. Their exploits tragic, triumphant, awe inspiring, and even humorous. But their stories are unknown. These women warriors—these “Band of Sisters,” as it were—had far reaching effects on the entire world, and their stories deserve to be told.

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After a run of misfortune, portrait artist Nilda Ricci could use a stroke of luck. She seems to get just that when she inherits a shadowy Victorian, designed by an architect whose works were said to influence the mind supposedly, in beneficial ways. At first, Nilda's new home delivers multiple gifts, including the unexpected appearance of a housekeeper who' d helped maintain the home for years. Also, Nilda finds herself falling for a handsome neighbor, a chemist whose herbal tonics boost her creativity to new heights. But as Nilda seeks revenge-by-painting against a contempt-worthy portrait subject, she begins having strange experiences in the house, making her wonder whether the place is haunted or whether its architect's intentions were less than benevolent. She also begins to suspect that her neighbor, and his gifts of tonics, aren't what they seem. All along, the housekeeper seems to be looking out for Nilda. But in time she reveals needs of her own, which may prove more powerfu

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After Romilly's mother's death of a strange fever years ago, neighbors and family fled her village. Bereft, her father becomes increasingly withdrawn, revealing little of their family history that Romilly longs to understand. When her beloved uncle mysteriously disappears from his boat on a cloudless night at sea, she senses her father's growing terrora terror she shares when she spies an enormous Being opening a sail-shaped flap of sky over their wheat field. Romilly suspects these inexplicable events are connected, but how? With the help of unlikely alliesthe healer Arra, Robbie the boisterous crow, and the kestrel Mira Romilly must convince her father to dismantle the wall to his greatest secret, and that of the Being that exists in the world beyond.

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In 1985, the shooting of Mr. Marfeo disrupts the quiet suburban neighborhood of Maple Bay and prompts thirteen-year-old Zinnia Zompa to reorganize everything she knows about her parentstheir preoccupations, obsessions, and above all, their battles with each other. As her understanding of the world grows, Zinnia sees how the violence she witnesses is part of a larger pattern of domination, one that shadows the world far beyond her neighborhood, and her coming-of-age means reckoning with this darkness.

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It’s 1944. The Pangs own The Hundred Choices Department Store, a thriving business in northern Korea that caters to wealthy Japanese. Thirteen-year-old Miyook Pang has spent two years serving in the war effort on behalf of Japan during the Japanese Occupation of her country. Miyook endures exhaustion and illness, but only when she is sent to work in the dreaded dye factory – a place deemed Hell’s Chamber by her older brother, Hoon - does she experience spiritual death. It is here where she meets Song-ho, an orphaned boy, and unbeknownst to her, the brief encounter will prove fateful. When Japan loses the war, Russian soldiers capture her beloved hometown and The Hundred Choices Department Store, leaving the city in ruin. With the Korean War looming, Miyook must take a dangerous flight south, across the 38th parallel now guarded by the newly formed North Korean Army. Here, once again, she encounters Song-ho, an event that will change the course of her life.

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Blois, 1705. The château of Duc Hugo d’Amboise simmers with rivalry and intrigue. Henriette d’Augustin, one of five mistresses of the duc, lives at the chateau with her daughter. When the duc’s wife, Duchesse Charlotte, maliciously undermines a new mistress, Letitia, Henriette is forced to choose between position and morality. She fights to maintain her status whilst targeted by the duchesse who will do anything to harm her enemies. The arrival of charismatic tarot reader, Romain de Villiers, further escalates tensions as rivals in love and domestic politics strive for supremacy.In a society where status is a matter of life and death, Henriette must stay true to herself, her daughter, and her heart, all the while hiding a painful secret of her own.

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Sixteen-year-old Reece is an expert at keeping secrets. She has to be, since her father abducted her ten years ago. For as long as she can remember, she’s been on the run, sneaking food out of the dumpster and sleeping in the woods. Every time she moves, the same rules apply—cut your hair, change your name, and, above all, don’t let anybody get too close. Reece has no choice except to obey Dad’s orders. When Reece meets her first real friend, a boy named Shawn, she begins to realize that everyone else has secrets too. And the deadliest secret of all is the one her father has kept from her all these years.

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With the Spanish flu pandemic on the rise, a former gold rush town— once the largest city in the Pacific Northwest— is threatened with extinction via eminent domain should their population fall below 125 citizens. To save their homes, former madam Maude Dollarhyde, her mixed-race grand-daughter, Bountiful, and their fellow council members agree to sell four abandoned mansions for a penny apiece if the buyers will stay in town long enough to be counted in the 1920 census. Soon, an eclectic cast of newcomers arrives, including a New York actor and his questionably-familial family; a lawyer with an agoraphobic wife, mute son, and austere nanny; six excommunicated Mormons; and the great-nephew of the town’ s hated former boss. As real estate developer and politician Gerald Dredd plots to foil the council’ s plan, the new families move in and knock over the first domino in a row that includes three romances, twelve sticks of dynamite, an unintentionally hilarious community theater production, an investigation by a Chicago insurance detective, and last of all, murder!

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After moving to the tiny village of Biskopskulla, middle school student Clara Hutchins discovers that her family has a history in the region: one hundred forty years ago, one of her ancestors was hanged as a witch from the white oak tree on the edge of town. When Clara finds a mildewed diary in the basement, she’ s even able to read the rambling thoughts of her long-dead relative. But when the book’ s predictions about Clara’ s own life start coming true, she wonders if those 19th-century villagers had a point: maybe her great-great-great grandmother really did have unearthly abilities. Now, a break-in at the tomb of the town’ s founder means a great evil has returned to Biskopskulla. Clara and her newest friends— two of the weirdest boys in school— must join forces to decipher the messages of a murdered witch and stop an unnatural catastrophe. But as they quest through historic cemeteries, backcountry libraries, and high-octane scholastic bowl tournaments, something sinister is lurking, watching, and waiting…

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"Indigo Field brims with multigenerational drama, earthy spirituality, and deeply imagined characters you are unlikely to forget." —Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Invention of Wings, The Book of Longings, and The Secret Life of BeesIn the rural South, a retired colonel in an upscale retirement community grieves the sudden death of his wife on the tennis court. On the other side of the highway, an elderly Black woman grieves the murder of her niece by a white man. Between them lies an abandoned field where three centuries of crimes are hidden, and only she knows the explosive secrets buried there. When the colonel runs into her car, causing a surprising amount of damage, it sparks a feud that sets loose the spirits in the Field, both benevolent and vengeful. In prose that’s been called “dazzling” and “mesmerizing,” in the animated voices of trees and birds and people, in Southern-voiced storytelling as deeply layered as that of Pat Conroy, Marjorie Hudson lays out the boundaries of a field that contains the soul of the South, and leads us to a day of reckoning.

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In search of a new life, Reuben and Ardith Rosenfeld and their two children move from Chicago to the small town of Welton, Colorado, looking for all the hope that the burgeoning West has to offer—its abundance of jobs, space, sunshine, prosperity, and the promise of reinvention. Reuben, a former copyeditor at the Chicago Tribune, purchases the local town paper, the Welton Sentinel. Ardith stays home and copes with the task of fixing up an older house, which suffers such disrepair that on Halloween it’s mistaken for part of a haunted house tour. Teenaged Harry continues his life as a troubled loner, skipping school and losing his tooth in a mysterious encounter. Meanwhile, Reuben, unaware that Ardith is having an affair, worries about his wife’s growing unhappiness and distance from the family. One night, after a cookout at some friends’ dairy farm, a fatal hit-and-run occurs that shocks the community, exposes a secret, and begins to rip apart the Rosenfeld family. The Tenderest of Strings is a riveting, full-hearted story of what it takes to survive as a family in a small Western town that beckons from afar but will put its newcomers to the test of their lives.

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More accurately a love triptych than triangle, The Femme Fatale Hypothesis is the story of one spring in 2015 when three people form intimate bonds forged in the fires of their respective tribulations. As Rose Geddes’s lung cancer progresses toward its inexorable end and her husband’s ability to care for her diminishes, their widowed neighbor, June Danhill, stumbles into the middle of their intersecting crises. June’s only son, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren have recently moved to the West Coast. She embraces the opportunity to distract herself from her loneliness by helping to care for the Geddeses. But it isn’t long before June realizes that Rose wants more from her than she is willing to give. Love and loss, family secrets, visiting vultures, the Memorial Park boys, a long-forgotten keepsake, morphine versus fentanyl, and the sexual cannibalism of the false garden mantid all fuel this psychological thriller that tests the thin line between mercy and murder.

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"This well-timed collection is as compelling as it is cathartic." Buzzfeed News , "18 New Books From Small Presses That You Won't Want To Put Down" The collection encompasses the perspectives of women who are: front-line responders and recovering patients; going out to work, staying home to work, and losing their jobs; living with multiple generations and living in isolation; women grieving loved ones and celebrating new love; women preparing to give birth and supporting the dying. Although differing based on location, age, race, and health, they share the unique capacity of women to bring their strength, ingenuity, and lovefor others and for selfto an uncertain time. The anthology is inspired by both the risks of the pandemic inherent to women and their tremendous role in the country's response.

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On May 1, 1982, eighteen-year-old Martin Oliphant watches a horse drown off the shore of Lake Michigan—the first of four equine corpses marking the trail that will lead Martin out of the small-minded small town of Pierre, Michigan, onto the open ranges of Elko, Nevada, and into the open arms, or at least open mics, of the cowboy poets who gather there to perform. Along the way, he nurtures a dying mother, who insists the only thing wrong with her is tennis elbow; corrals a demented father, who believes he’s Father Christmas; assists the dissolute local newspaper editor; and serves stints as horse rustler and pet mortician. For thirty years, Martin searches for an escape route to the West, to poetry, and to his first love, the cowgirl Ginger, but never manages to get much farther than the city limits of his Midwestern hometown—that is, until a world famous cow horse dies while touring through Pierre, and Martin is tapped to transport its remains to the funeral at the 32nd Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence.

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STUDENT GIVES TEACHER THE FINGER, screams the Post headline after Patrick Lynch slams his classroom door on the hand of Josh Mishkin, the learning-disabled son of two NYU professors. Josh’s injury casts Patrick, thirty-year-old son of the Midwest, down a New York City rabbit hole of Board of Ed bureaucracy and union politics. Transformed into an unwilling celebrity by his fellow inmates in that teacher purgatory, the Rubber Room, Mr. Lynch is suddenly more “at risk” than any of his students. Now he must fight his way back to his classroom at Marcus Garvey High School and reclaim the affections of his social worker fiancÉe, all while wrestling the legend of his late father, Superintendent Lynch, the pride of Peterson’s Prairie, Minnesota.

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Malcolm, an orphaned field mouse, is considered a nuisance by his house-mouse relatives who live at 65 Rodent Row, Mouse-Town Estates, in the gloomy basement of Balmoral Castle. He is a misfit who does poorly at school and is bullied by his cousins. While house mice serve as collectors within the castle walls, Malcolm yearns to follow in his daddie’s paw-steps and become an explorer of the outside world. While collecting in the royal kitchen one afternoon, Malcolm is discovered by Chief Castle Cook. In his mad dash to escape, Malcolm inadvertently exposes the MI Mouse-Way Ramp 3 to human eyes. Disaster strikes! Royal staff board up mouse holes and bait traps with poison. Mouse-Town Estates is threatened with death and starvation. Malcolm seizes the opportunity to try to save the house-mouse community and to explore the outside world at the same time. Will Malcolm survive four fat royal corgis, being trapped in the royal handbag, arrest, and imprisonment to save the day? Or will Her Majesty the Queen succeed in chopping off his head?

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Your Black Friend Has Something To Say is a powerful debut and an intimate examination of race and identity. For thirty years Melva Graham has lived and worked in neighborhoods that are predominantly white and wealthy. Just to be clear, she is neither. The only thing that makes her more uncomfortable than talking about herself is talking about race—and she has decided to do both. In this bold and brutally honest memoir Melva answers back to the bias and bigotry she has experienced from childhood to adulthood, as she attends private school in a Pittsburgh suburb, studies acting at NYU, works as a nanny for the one percent, and balances a social life in between. This narrative depicts one woman’s journey to own her truth, find her voice, and take back her power.

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Thirteen-year-old Tara does whatever it takes to keep her beautiful, audacious, and addicted mother, Joan, from falling through the cracks. When a sinkhole forces her rural Louisiana town to evacuate, Tara finds herself homeless and her mother’s impulsive personality unleashed. But Joan’s raw charisma and plain speak quickly establish her as the public face of the catastrophe. The community rallies around her, and social media demands justice. A class action lawyer grooms Joan to play the starring role in a carefully crafted PR campaign. Tara dares to imagine a better life, built upon the proceeds of the settlement the whole town will share, a life that might even include college. But as the spotlight intensifies, and the promise of a settlement looms, Joan’s demons return with a vengeance. Tara must decide whether to pull her mother from the brink as she’s always done, or let her fall, severing ties with the only family she’s ever known.

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The Outlook for Earthlings traces an unusual, difficult friendship across a lifetime, between women of stunningly opposite natures. Melanie Taper is timid, compelled to obey and venerate authority. Yet in unguarded moments she demonstrates such deadly insight into human foibles as to suggest a strength that has, for dark reasons, deliberately hidden itself. Scarlet Rand, by contrast, is rash, willful, and impatient of reverence of any stripe. Scarlet is shocked by Mel's passive reserve; despite her obvious gifts, Mel is—bafflingly—self-erasing. Mel's saintliness maddens Scarlet—because finally and most troublingly, Scarlet disbelieves it. Their friendship suggests to each a final frontier, a saving sanctuary. Yet at its core, a pained impasse soon becomes evident: each woman takes a secret, moral offense at the other's inmost nature—and choices. Living out these differences—against awareness of the illness which is slowly destroying one of them—proves an ultimate challenge. In each, a reckoning must occur. The Outlook for Earthlings examines what women want, amid conflicting layers of need. It ponders beginnings, endings, and Virginia Woolf's declaration that good angels must be killed. It considers the limits of friendship—and of the act of witnessing. At its heart, it asks how we may finally measure a life—and who should do the measuring.

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Set during the early years of Lebanon's fifteen-year civil war, We Walked On immerses readers in the landscape of war, weaving political unrest into everyday life. With Hisham, a thirty-year-old Arabic teacher, and Rita, his fourteen-year-old student, Chehade has created two richly drawn characters who counter violence with the redemptive power of books and human connection and find authentic hope in untenable circumstances. We Walked On is a timely novel that examines the power of war to pervert our moral sense and asks if peace is ever possible in an unjust world.

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In 2007, Beck Randall moves with his wife and teenage daughters into a long-abandoned cabin deep in the woods, built a century before by his grandparents. Once there, daughters Tina and Lucy discover that their predecessors have left an imprint of suffering and violence the girls refer to as The Whistler, an eerie presence infused in the nature that surrounds them. As the 1907 and 2007 storylines braid together, characters and events intrude upon each other, blurring the boundaries between eras and illustrating that people and lives are not forgotten; instead, they are woven into the fabric of the land itself. With gritty, lyrical storytelling, Let Gravity Seize the Dead is an intergenerational literary horror story featuring a blend of suspense, beauty, and terror.

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Before the Silk Road had a name, nomads roamed the Asian steppes and women fought side by side as equals with men. Like all women of the Sauromatae, Akmaral is bound for battle from birth, training as a girl in horsemanship, archery, spear, and blade. Her prowess ignites the jealousy of Erzhan, a gifted warrior who hates her as much as he desires her. When Scythian renegades attack, the two must unite to defeat them. Among their captives is Timor, the rebels' enigmatic leader who refuses to be broken, even as he is enslaved. He fascinates Akmaral. But as attraction grows to passion, she is blinded to the dangerous alliance forming between the men who bristle against the clan's matriarchal rule. Faced with brutal betrayal, Akmaral must find the strength to defend her people and fulfill her destiny. Drawn from legends of Amazon women warriors from ancient Greece and recent archaeological discoveries in Central Asia, AKMARAL is a sweeping tale about a powerful woman who must make peace wi

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Oliver Curtin grows up in a nocturnal world with a mother who is a sex worker and drug addict, and whose love is real yet increasingly unreliable. His narration alternates between that troubled childhood and the present of the novel, where he is serving the last months of a thirty-years-to-life sentence in a maximum-security prison in upstate New York, for a crime he committed at age seventeen. His redemption is closely allied with his memories, seen with growing clarity and courage. If he can remember, then life in the larger world is possible for him.

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“Ott's prose crackles and sizzles. There's never a dull moment, right to the riveting end. It's the kind of novel Hemingway might have written had he been alive today.” ~Erik Martiny, author of Night of the Long Goodbyes West is a man looking to flee the past, barely old enough to drink and looking to rediscover himself after several tours in Afghanistan as a POW prison guard. After going AWOL, West looks to reunite with Solomon, his childhood best friend, who exists in the dark underworld of a Los Angeles gentleman’s club, Club Paradise. West soon finds himself caught in the web of an Iranian family and its patriarch, Big Z Pourali, a former wrestler with a dark side and side businesses that put his dancers, employees, and family in peril. West stays in LA to look after Solomon but soon falls for the club owner’s daughter Nikki. West must come to terms with the raw underside of a Los Angeles crime family and his own past, all the while hoping to maintain his sanity in the process.

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Jazz-age Paris was the center of the artistic and literary world, and the center of the center was Gertrude Stein’ s salon, where the famous and aspiring creative talents gathered to gawk at Stein’ s Picassos and vie for status. Young Midwesterner Ida Caine arrives in Paris with her husband Teddy, a would-be Hemingway who thinks he can adventure first and write later. When Teddy falls in with the Stein set, he brings Ida to the salon, where she is shunted into a corner with the wives of famous men. She burns with resentment and wonders if she can ever develop into a real artist herself. A few days later, Gertrude Stein’ s partner Alice B. Toklas vanishes.Stein calls upon Teddy to investigate. Soon after, he vanishes. Forced to seek out her missing husband, Ida follows his trail through a milieu including strange Surrealist rituals, Tarot card readings, and the catacombs beneath the city. She falls in with a young American poet, T.S. Eliot. An unlikely passion grows while they seek answers to the shocking disappearances.

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In search of meaning amid America’s sedated upper-middle class, a cynical college graduate forgoes medical school and moves to inner-city Chicago. When he falls in love with a woman uncompromisingly devoted to her community, he finds himself caught between two lives, one he does not want and one he cannot have.

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In contemporary Paris, Nancy Roach is fed up with her flagging dissertation research and flees to the English countryside to escape the mounting pressure from her dissertation advisor. There, she stumbles upon an illustration of “The Parasol Flower” in a nineteenth-century treatise, which draws her into the life of Hannah Inglis, a talented artist who slipped out of art history and into the Malaysian wilderness. Working from Hannah’s letters and a cache of paintings, Nancy attempts to reconstruct a pivotal year in Hannah’s life. The year is 1896 and Hannah Inglis, a painter, is pushing back against her husband and their circle of ex-patriot friends in British Malaysia, who see her art as an uncivilizing influence. She finds support from two unlikely sources—the intimidating Eva Peterborough, an evolutionary biologist, and the Sikh police sergeant Darshan Singh who assists on treks to paint en plein air. With their help, she embarks on a search for a rare and legendary specimen—a flower that blooms as big as a lady’s parasol. The Parasol Flower traces the borders of science, art, race, and class and establishes new boundaries.

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It's an unusually warm autumn, 1929, and O.T. Lawrence is about as content as a cotton farmer can be in Five Forks, Georgia. Nothing—not poverty, drought, or even the boll weevi—can spoil the idyllic life he shares with his doting wife and children and his beloved twin brother Walt. Until illness and Black Tuesday take everything O.T. ever held dear in one fell swoop. Grieving, drinking, and careening toward homelessness, O.T. is on the brink of ending it all when he receives an odd letter from a teenage acquaintance, the enigmatic Sivvy Hargrove, who is locked away in Milledgeville’s asylum for the insane. Traveling through desperate antebellum towns, O.T. and his daughter Ginny are determined to find Sivvy and discover her story. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, Monarchs Under the Sassafras Tree is a love story to Georgia and the spirit of its people—a story of family, unconditional love, poverty, injustice, and finding the strength inside to keep on going when all is lost.

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Winter Break turns deadly when Rory Quinn and her treasure-hunter grandmother travel to Iceland in search of an enchanted artifact. Their mission is to recover a blood-smeared stone that legend says will lead whoever possesses it to the nearest doorway to Hell. The client’ s grandson, Einar, took the stone at the request of his favorite heavy metal band. As part of a publicity stunt, the band plans to open the closest doorway, rumored to exist deep inside one of Iceland’ s many volcanoes, in just three days. Along with Einar’ s twin brother, Gunnar, Rory and Gram will need to navigate glaciers, ice caves, and volcanic tunnels in search of the missing artifact. But can the three of them recover the stone before the band unleashes anything evil into the Icelandic wilderness? As the team grows closer to Einar, Rory is growing closer to Gunnar, too. But she can tell he’ s keeping secrets from her. Big ones, that when revealed, will cause her to question almost everything she’ s ever believed.

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