Imagine becoming an adult under the imposing shadow of the Soviet Union. That’s what Sonya faces when she’s pulled down from her quiet life in Siberia to rejoin her mother, a Jewish dissident, in the USSR’s waning days. In Katia... Read More

Nimble and effusive, the tales of Sam Reese’s "Come the Tide" are an aesthete’s paradise, moving from haunting snapshots toward often amorphous conclusions. There are bronzed commas of bodies, vines climbing walls like elaborate... Read More

Job was born just in time to watch the promise of the former United States fade definitively away. Kirk Kjeldsen’s darkly realistic postapocalyptic novel "East" begins in the small Oregon town where Job grew up—where the mines lie... Read More

Plumbing the possibilities of travels through the multiverse, K. P. Kyle’s science fiction thriller "Sync" sets two ordinary people against powerful and nefarious forces. On a dark expanse of New England road, Brigid is so caught up in... Read More

“The conversation hobbles on,” Harriet Shawcross observes at a camp for children with selective mutism. “Without daily practice, they grasp at topics like leaves in a stream, exchanging information, but never quite conversing.”... Read More

Family tragedies and new opportunities play against each other in "Beyond the Moon and the Heartache Too", a novella about growing up and growing past artificial limits. Anne Hutcheson’s novella "Beyond the Moon and the Heartache Too"... Read More

Centering on an excruciatingly passionate love story, Louise Beech’s "The Lion Tamer Who Lost" is a rich literary text that includes family tragedies, unexpected discoveries, and second chances, all considered against the vibrant... Read More

Holly Ringland’s piquant debut, "The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart", is alternately airy and precise. It occupies a space somewhere between a fairy tale and a modern tragedy. Alice is born by the seaside. She drinks salt air and spends... Read More