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

A suspect’s hobby, an overheard word, and a bottle cap knocked eschew: everything is a clue in Riku Onda’s riveting novel "The Aosawa Murders", whose terrible central crime cannot be solved too many times. Some cases capture the... Read More

The daily realities of war-torn Sudan are recorded in the detail-heavy novel "Nyasala". Hugo Jackson’s novel "Nyasala" focuses on the struggles and persistence of a few exemplary individuals within Sudan’s complicated war zones. As... Read More

The poems of Cassandra J. Bruner’s "The Wishbone Dress" are a torrent on the page, attesting to the traps and triumphs of womanhood, to the liberation of self-naming, and the peace and harmony that come from acknowledging that no two... Read More

In busy Beijing, everyone is connected. So a writer discovers when he’s tasked with telling the billionaire Qin’s enmeshed story in Jonathan Tel’s deliciously tangled Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao. In the book’s opening... Read More

Death has never been quite so uplifting as it is in "Welcome to the Pine Away Motel and Cabins", Katarina Bivald’s feel-good novel about a friendly ghost who’s determined to repair relationships from the not-far beyond. Henny always... Read More

The winkingly endearing stories of Nancy McKinley’s "St. Christopher on Pluto" function like a scrapbook, capturing life in a small Pennsylvania town through connected anecdotes that span decades. Before their neighborhood Halloween... Read More

Marty Chan’s fascinating "Metamorphosis" takes place in a steampunk, alternate reality version of early twentieth-century New York City, wherein interdimensional travelers and Earth’s natives clash. Ehrich Weisz, a former demon... Read More