While recovering from a near fatal illness, Nancy Pressly discovers a treasure trove of family material stored in her attic. Haunted by images of her grandparents and her parents in their youth, she sets out to create a family narrative before it is lost forever. It takes several more years before she summons the courage to reconstitute a path back to her...

From the award-winning author of Eliza Waite comes a gripping tale of adventure and survival based on the true story of the ill-fated Donner Party on their 2,200-mile trek on the Oregon–California Trail from 1846 to ’47.

Nineteen-year-old Ada Weeks confronts danger and calamity along the hazard-filled journey to California. After a fateful decision...

A richly imagined novel based on the life of artist Agnes Pelton, whose life tracks the early days of modernism in America. Born into a family ruined by scandal, Agnes becomes part of the lively New York art scene, finding early success in the famous Armory Show of 1913. Fame seems inevitable, but Agnes is burdened by shyness and instead retreats to a...

Once a promising young concert pianist, Camille Childs retreated to her mother’s Santa Barbara estate after an injury to her hand destroyed her hopes for a musical career. She now leads a solitary life teaching piano, and she has a star student: Graciela, the daughter of her mother’s Mexican housekeeper. Camille has been grooming the young Graciela for the...

An eighteen year-old boy’s serio-comic, twenty-four hour journey into manhood.

It’s a big day for Joey Hunter, known in his Bronx neighborhood as Hunt. Not only is it his eighteenth birthday, but it’s the day of his senior prom and his date with the first girl he’s ever been in love with. But things don’t turn out as he expects in his pursuit of the girl...

For fans of Elizabeth Strout, Kent Haruf, Tobias Wolfe, and Ann Beattie...

In these ten elegantly written short stories, Caitlin Hamilton Summie takes readers from WWII Kansas City to a poor, drug-ridden neighborhood in New York, from western Massachusetts to woodsy Wisconsin, and from the quiet of rural Minnesota to its pulsing Twin Cities, each time...

An extraordinary novel inspired by true events.
1943. Tasa Rosinski and five relatives, all Jewish, escape their rural village in eastern Poland—avoiding certain death—and find refuge in a bunker beneath a barn built by their longtime employee.
A decade earlier, ten-year-old Tasa dreams of someday playing her violin like Paganini. To continue her...

The stories in Joyce Hinnefeld’s collection The Beauty of Their Youth depict characters—a German tourist in the Florida Everglades, an outspoken artist trying to paint one true moment in a woman’s life, a middle-aged woman revisiting her time as a naïve college exchange student, and more—who must face the limits, and the fallibility, of their own memories...

Trevor McFarquhar lives a controlled, contrary existence. Traumatized by early childhood loss, the silence surrounding those losses, and then a sudden family relocation from the United States to France, he has no ambitions or dreams for his struggling Parisian bicycle shop or even for himself. Now in his late thirties, his romantic relationships are only...

Love is the foundation of family, but at what cost? After Ben Novotny is born with a rare chromosomal disorder that produces profound mental disability and brain-racking seizures, his parents, Caroline and Perry, and their two other children are asked to give more than they have. When Ben is an infant, the care and the fear are constant. The demands and...

Part culinary memoir and part travelogue, Carole Bumpus gathered this compilation of intimate interviews, conversations, stories, and traditional family recipes (cuisine pauvre) in the kitchens of French families as she traveled throughout the countryside. Travel with her through Champagne caves/wineries and historic cathedrals, local farmers’ markets...

Beth Mayer’s debut short story collection, WE WILL TELL YOU OTHERWISE is winner of The Hudson Prize, offered by Black Lawrence Press. It’s easy to see why. Her stories are surprising, sometimes dark, inventive, and deep. From the book collector who does not read to the mesmerizing Cha Cha McGee, a young girl who defines indomitable, Mayer writes of everyday...

When they were young, Susan and Edna, children of Holocaust refugee parents, were inseparable; Edna was Susan’s first love and constant companion. But as they grew up and Edna’s physical, and mental challenges altered the ways she could develop, a gulf formed between them. Susan’s life became even more complicated when, just short of her sixteenth birthday...

At the age of forty-five, Deborah Tobola returns to her birthplace, San Luis Obispo, to work in the very prison her father worked in when he was a student at Cal Poly. But she’s not wearing a uniform as he did; she’s there to teach creative writing and manage the prison’s arts program—a dream job.

As she creates a theatre program for prisoners, Tobola...

In the summer of 1994, a freak lightning and thunder storm explodes on the southern coast of Maine, killing Nancy Bills’s husband and critically wounding her younger son. She promises her late husband that she will write their family’s story and bind it with a red ribbon of love and courage. In language alternately tender and gritty, The Red Ribbon...

Layng Martine Jr. knew from an early age what he most wanted in the world: to be free. Free to decide every day how he would spend that day. His father worked long days in New York City, and it was his mother who became the defining force in his life. She believed that kids need to be given free rein to explore, fail, and get back up. So Layng rode his...

Julie Zuckerman’s moving and engrossing debut novel-in-stories, THE BOOK OF JEREMIAH, tells the story of awkward but endearing Jeremiah Gerstler—the son of Jewish immigrants, brilliant political science professor, husband, father. Jeremiah has yearned for respect and acceptance his entire life, and no matter his success, he still strives for more. As a...

To save her marriage, Laura Harrison accompanies her husband Jack to Indonesia where he is to take over as president of troubled bank; but when her premonitions become reality, events spin out of control. Laura expects their new home in Jakarta to be a romantic hideaway like something out of a classic Bogart movie. Instead she walks into a house of...

Dena was a busy midwife trapped on the hamster wheel of working motherhood. Adam was an eccentric Buddhist yogi passing as a hard-working dad. Bella was fourteen and wanted to be normal. Sophia was up for anything that involved skipping school. Together, they shouldered backpacks, walked away from their California life of all-night births, carpool...

Barbara Hoffbeck never quite felt she fit into the small farming community of Big Stone City, South Dakota—and as the youngest of seven growing up during the post-Depression era, she struggled to find her place within her large Catholic family. Barbara defied expectations at every turn, determined to prove her worth in a male-dominated time and place...