In Donna Grassby’s moving debut, Kate’s Ring, a thirteen-year-old girl tries to hold her family together through hardships and tragedy. Kate is the oldest of six siblings. Her mother suffers from tuberculosis; her father is loving,... Read More

Luke Salisbury’s stunning Civil War novel "No Common War" brings America’s bloodiest war to life through the eyes of a father, a son, and those who care about them. Mason Salisbury, a staunch abolitionist, has seen the cruelty of... Read More

Kathleen Sprows Cummings’s thorough and spirited "A Saint of Our Own" looks at the Catholic community in the United States and its desire for an American saint. Well-researched in historical and religious context, the book conveys the... Read More

"Bloodflowers" is a nuanced, scholarly analysis of the brief but influential career of photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, whose family fled Nigeria’s 1960s civil war for London. He subsequently lived in Washington and New York until his... Read More

Gökçe Günel’s "Spaceship in the Desert" is the fascinating story of a “zero-carbon eco-city” that demonstrates the stark difference between vision and reality. Masdar City, located in the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi, was marketed... Read More

Trained alongside Albert Einstein, Mileva Marić, the renowned physicist’s first wife, has been credited with being a brilliant mathematician, surpassing Einstein himself; it’s also been said that she coauthored his 1905 paper on... Read More

In her novel "The Gifts We Keep", Katie Grindeland layers revelations over misunderstandings to spin a complex and ultimately unsustainable web of secrets between a family, their neighbor, and the ten-year-old girl who comes to stay with... Read More

“[T]here was so much hurt and pain and fear and sorrow … that I needed more than one kind of song to sing,” says one of Penny Mickelbury’s characters in God’s Will and Other Lies. Here a cacophony of voices sing, spit, and... Read More