Three troubled but tough generations of women, all molded and wounded by the Pentecostal culture around them, are celebrated in Kelli Jo Ford’s masterpiece, patchwork novel, "Crooked Hallelujah". Religion became a source of both... Read More

Though much of it is set among the dead, Valérie Perrin’s "Fresh Water for Flowers" is an exuberant novel whose thoughtful treatments of family tragedies are alchemistic. Abandoned at birth, Violette was shunted between disinterested... Read More

In Anna Dorn’s "Vagablonde", Prue, a Los Angeles lawyer, hopes to wean herself off of various psychotropic prescriptions. Prue is also an aspiring rapper, despite the fact that she is bourgeois and has “the coloring of a Nazi.” As... Read More

Daniel Ben-Horin’s black comedy "Substantial Justice" concerns humanity’s best and worst traits. In the 1980s, Spider makes an honest living as a mechanic and distracts himself from lost love with mind-altering drugs. Then, ten years... Read More

In The Anarchists’ Club, Alex Reeve brings back his large-hearted Victorian sleuth, Leo Stanhope, a transgender man who’s swept into a loury London murder case. When a stranger’s body is found at the Social and Democratic... Read More

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s novel "Starling Days" is a gentle treatise on the anatomy of sadness, wherein the many manifestations of modern melancholy raise questions about what it truly means to be “okay.” Mina wants to silence the... Read More

A family grapples with prejudice and impending loss in Carter Sickels’s historical novel "The Prettiest Star". In 1980, Brian ran away from his conservative hometown and arrived in New York City, where he could live openly as a gay... Read More

The faithful girls of a struggling California town are asked to sacrifice an ungodly amount in Chelsea Bieker’s "Godshot", a blazing novel about the messes made when blind faith metastasizes into madness. In the heat of a deep Central... Read More