In Mary Clearman Blew’s novel "Think of Horses", a disheartened, middle-aged romance novelist returns to her native Montana to reevaluate her life choices. It’s summer in Sun Creek, the mountainous ranching country that skilled horse... Read More

In Helena Close’s contemporary novel "Things I Know", a teenage girl battles with grief, memory, and her identity. Saoirse’s father relocated her and her two siblings from Limerick to an even smaller town after their mother’s... Read More

Dave Dempsey spent more than three decades working in a range of environmental-policy roles in Michigan, and those experiences inform his new essay collection "Half Wild". The stories in the book all discuss the intersection of human... Read More

An unassuming fruit orchard holds the promise of a peaceful future for a hardworking Amish family in Beverly Lewis’s novel "The Orchard". Ellie values her faith and her family, but tending to a generations-old peach and apple orchard... Read More

An elder care worker struggles with her daughter’s choices in Kim Hye-jin’s moving novel "Concerning My Daughter". A mother raises her child, instills good values, and models appropriate behavior: for the novel’s unnamed narrator,... Read More

Driven by their convictions and their passion for music, two English sisters provide aid to German Jewish families in Marianne Monson’s kaleidoscopic historical novel "The Opera Sisters". In the 1930s, Ida and Louise are typists in... Read More

An observant girl navigates adolescence in a vibrant neighborhood in Chelene Knight’s coming-of-age novel "Junie". In 1933 in Vancouver, Junie and her mother, Maddie, move to the East End, a neighborhood teeming with life and color.... Read More

Descriptions of nature as competitive (Charles Darwin) and “red in tooth and claw” (Alfred, Lord Tennyson) shaped the way people perceive it today. "Sweet in Tooth and Claw" debunks such concepts to reveal that, in fact, cooperation... Read More