Pauline works long and exhausting shifts as a nurse, then spends her off time and remaining energy trying to get her ailing and mentally unstable father to get out of bed and eat a can of soup. Debt and divorce have Freddie constantly on the run, working around the clock to stay not even a …
This book. This [bleep]ing book. Each of us has one: that one book that you’ll fight to get into the hands of readers who are so sure it’s not for them because of the genre or the title or whatever. For me, this year, this is that book. I’ve read a lot of big, important …
I am delighted to be serving on the PNBA awards committee when Leslye Walton’s debut novel was nominated. Reading The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender feels like dreaming or being under a spell. A heartbroken woman turns into a canary, a kiss on the neck leaves a permanent mark that only slowly fades through …
Be warned: To read Adrianne Harun’s A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain is to subject yourself to a constant sense of subdued terror and simultaneous wide-eyed wonder. Harun is a master storyteller and Mountain reads like folklore. She delivers blaringly real characters and setting mixed with carefully metered out magical realism and …
Abigail Rook has always wanted to pave her own way, going against her parents’ wishes of a college education and instead going on an archaeological dig. When her dreams don’t pan out, she cannot return home and face her parents so she instead embarks on a journey across the Atlantic to New Fiddleham in New …
