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Finalist, 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards 2017 IPPY Awards: Contemporary Fiction, Gold Medal Readers' Favorite: Gold Medal Award for Women's Fiction Andrew Carnegie funded fifty-nine public libraries in Kansas in the early 20th century—but it was frontier women who organized waffle suppers, minstrel shows, and women’s baseball games to buy books to fill them. Now, a century later, Angelina returns to her father’s hometown of New Hope to complete her dissertation on the Carnegie libraries, just as Traci and Gayle arrive in town—Traci as an artist-in-residence at the renovated Carnegie Arts Center and Gayle as a refugee whose neighboring town, Prairie Hill, has just been destroyed by a tornado. The discovery of an old journal inspires the women to create a library and arts center as the first act of rebuilding Prairie Hill after the tornado. As they work together to raise money for the center, Traci reveals her enormous heart, Angelina discovers that problem-solving is more valuable than her PhD, and Gayle demonstrates that courage is not about waiting out a storm but building a future. Full of Kansas history—from pioneer homesteaders to Carrie Nation to orphan trains—To the Stars through Difficulties is a contemporary story of women changing their world, and finding their own voices, powers, and self-esteem in the process. Author: Romalyn Tilghman Publication Date: April 4, 2017 -
On an ordinary day in June of 1964 in a small town in the Altiplano of Peru, Sister Mary Katherine (formerly known as Kate), a young American nun recently arrived in this very foreign place, walks away from her convent with no money and no destination. Desperate and afraid of her feelings for an Irish priest with whom she has been working, she spends eight days on the run, encountering a variety of characters along the way: a cynical Englishman who helps her out; a suspicious Peruvian police officer who takes her in for questioning; and two American Peace Corps workers who befriend her. As Kate traverses this dangerous physical journey through Peru, she also embarks upon an interior journey of self-discovery—one that leads her somewhere she never could have expected. Author: Marian O’Shea Wernicke Publication Date: September 29, 2020 -
2017 IPPY Gold Medal Winner in Best Regional Fiction: South “This debut author has a knack for storytelling and great characters.” —Booklist After attending the funeral of her estranged friend Skip in Knoxville, Tennessee, Vrai (short for Vraiment), a forty-something art history librarian with sons of her own, rescues ten-year-old Jonathan, who has been abandoned with no shoes in the funeral home parking lot. The Blizzard of 1993 strands this unlikely duo at the Smoky View Motel, where, motivated in part by the unsolved murders of Jonathan’s parents, they begin to uncover the truth about Skip’s death. With elements of mystery and intrigue, True Stories at the Smoky View is primarily a novel about relationships: the love Vrai feels for her husband and sons, all of whom have left home; her friendship with Skip, which she begins to see in a new light; and her deepening bond with Jonathan. For Vrai and Jonathan, this is a story of mutual rescue—one that results in new lives for them both. Author: Jill McCroskey Coupe Publication Date: April 5, 2016 -
Tzippy is a wealthy widow, feisty, determined, vain and living in Florida. Her three children will be visiting for Tzippy’s 80th birthday celebration and will be bringing with them the old wounds that Tzippy did more than her fair share to inflict. As her birthday approaches, the death of a close friend as well as the aches, pains and daily indignities of aging are preying on her mind. Tzippy wonders how she will be remembered? Her relationship with her children is not good, particularly with Shari, her youngest and most screwed up. Shari is a problem drinker and still plagued by the eating disorder she’s had since adolescence. She always blamed her mother for her problems and lately Tzippy has had the uncomfortable feeling Shari may be right. On the day of the party, on edge and anxious, Tzippy decides on a shopping trip to Saks which is always her quick fix, and while there, sees a brooch she wants, but not enough to pay for it. It finds its way into her purse and as she is making her get away—unlike the other times—she is caught and hauled off to the police station. Now that Tzippy is turning 80, there is not an infinite amount of time left. Will She be able to repair the damage that has taken a lifetime to create? Author: Patricia Striar Rohner Publication Date: October 18, 2016 -
A collection of sixty-four black-and-white photographs and sixty-two poems, Unfolding in Light offers a vision of hands as images, symbols, and archetypes, allowing the numinous to shine through the mundane. Sisters Joan Scott and Claire Scott provides an intimate pause that gives the reader a quiet moment to reflect on the meaning of everyday hands: an ill child’s hands; a dying woman’s hands; hands of lovers, young and old; hands at work, at play, in pain, in prayer, and in love. Author: Joan and Claire Scott Publication Date: November 17, 2015 -
Jaded New York City Public Defender Liana Cohen would give anything to have one client in whom she can believe. Dozens of hardened criminals and repeat offenders have chipped away at her faith in both herself and the system. Her boyfriend Jakob’s high-powered law firm colleagues see her do-gooder job as a joke, which only adds to the increasing strain in their relationship. Enter imprisoned felon Danny Shea, whose unforgivable crime would raise a moral conflict in an attorney at the height of her idealism―and that hasn't been Liana in quite a while. But Danny's astonishing blend of good looks, intelligence, and vulnerability intrigues Liana. Could he be the client she’s been longing for―the wrongly accused in need of a second chance? Is he innocent? As their attorney-client relationship transforms into something less than arm’s length, Liana is forced to confront fundamental questions of truth, faith, and love―and to decide who she wants to be. Author: Reyna Marder Gentin Publication Date: November 13, 2018 -
Valeria Vose: A Novel takes a reader deep inside the cultural and emotional life of a 1970’s southern woman. Privileged, approaching age forty, her “perfect” life is shattered. Determined to survive, she’s forced to confront all preconceived values and expectations in order to find a path toward creative, spiritual independence and her true identity. Author: Alice Bingham Gorman Publication Date: October 2, 2018 -
Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist IndieFab Awards Finalist (Top 15) “Reed’s charming novel stars a neurotic singer with mother issues who has been avoiding auditions and attending frustrating therapy sessions instead. When Cecilia meets a homeless boy on the streets, however, her life takes a risky new direction. A well-written, endearing book that surprises . . . ” —Kirkus Reviews Approaching forty, unemployed but well-off, talented but unknown, functional but depressed, former musical actress Cecilia Morrison reluctantly starts therapy, hoping for a change in her life, but ultimately it's a runaway teenager who cons her out of sixty bucks, not therapy, that gives her the inspiration she's looking for. Author: Mary Hutchings Reed Publication Date: April 23, 2013 -
2015 IPPY: Gold: Contemporary Fiction, Winner After her farmhouse in Greenwich, Connecticut is destroyed, Lidia is thankful her teenage twins, Carly and Clarisse, are unharmed and that her friend Polly Niven has taken them in. Lidia, whose husband left her and the girls for another man, lost her job in the financial crisis. She fears more bad news and soon discovers a connection between her and Tina Calderara, the pilot who crashed into her home. In the midst of her troubles, she meets Harry Caligan, the FBI Special Agent assigned to her case. With Harry’s help, Lidia plunges into the family mystery linking her to Tina. Author: Jean P. Moore Publication Date: June 3, 2014 -
We Never Told is a page-turning novel about a glamorous family in the golden age of Hollywood. Set in suburban New York, it follows Sonya Adler's life from growing up in a "broken home," to the hippie sixties, and into the present with a shocking twist at the end. The story outlines a time when unmarried women were shamed into putting their newborns up for adoption and the consequences which have touched thousands of people. This fast-paced story is not just about sisters keeping a secret but is a heart-wrenching and funny tale about a not often talked-about part of American history: children finding their birth families fifty years later. Author: Diana Altman Publication Date: June 11, 2019 -
Kassie O’Callaghan’s meticulous plans to divorce her emotionally abusive husband, Mike, and move in with Chris, a younger man she met five years ago on a solo vacation in Venice, are disrupted when she finds out Mike has chronic kidney disease—something he’s concealed from her for years. Once again, she postpones her path to freedom—at least, until she pokes around his pajama drawer and discovers his illness is the least of his deceits. But Kassie is no angel, either. As she struggles to justify her own indiscretions, the secret lives she and Mike have led collide head-on, revealing a tangled web of sex, lies, and DNA. Still, mindful of her vows, Kassie commits to helping her husband find an organ donor. In the process, she uncovers a life-changing secret. Problem is, if she reveals it, her own immorality will be exposed, which means she has an impossible decision to make: Whose life will she save—her husband’s or her own? Author: Valerie Taylor Publication Date: September 15, 2020 -
In her second novel, Valerie Taylor—award-winning author of What’s Not Said—gives readers another romantic comedy interwoven with forbidden love, infidelity, and family. With the court date set for her divorce and the future she’d planned with a younger man presumably kaput, Kassie O’Callaghan shifts attention to reviving her stalled marketing career. But that goal gets complicated when she unexpectedly rendezvous with her former lover in Paris. After a chance meeting with a colleague and a stroll along Pont Neuf, Kassie receives two compelling proposals. Can she possibly accept them both? Kassie’s decision process screeches to a halt when her soon-to-be ex-husband has a heart attack, forcing her to fly home to Boston. There, she confronts his conniving and deceitful fiancée—a woman who wants not just a ring on her finger but everything that belongs to Kassie. In the ensuing battle to protect what’s legally and rightfully hers, Kassie discovers that sometimes it’s what’s not true that can set you free. Author: Valarie Taylor Publication Date: August 24, 2021 -
Forty-six-year-old Madeline Fairbanks has no use for ideas like “separation of the races” or “men as the superior sex.” There are many in her dying Southern Appalachian town who are upset by her socially progressive views, but for years—partly due to her late husband’s still-powerful influence, and partly due to her skill as a healer in a remote town with no doctor of its own—folks have been willing to turn a blind eye to her “transgressions.” Even Maddie’s decision to take on a Black apprentice, Ren Morgan, goes largely unchallenged by her white neighbors, though it’s certainly grumbled about. But when a charismatic and power-hungry new reverend blows into town in 1917 and begins to preach about the importance of racial segregation, the long-idle local KKK chapter fires back into action—and places Maddie and her friends in Jamesville’s Black community squarely in their sights. Maddie had better stop intermingling with Black folks, discontinue her herbalistic “witchcraft,” and leave town immediately, they threaten, or they’ll lynch Ren’s father, Daniel. Faced with this decision, Maddie is terrified . . . and torn. Will she bow to their demands and walk away—or will she fight to keep the home she’s built in Jamesville and protect the future of the people she loves, both Black and white? Author: Adele Holmes Publication Date: August 9, 2022 -
“A thought-provoking, gimlet-eyed satire of contemporary motherhood in the guise of a romantic comedy, Wishful Thinking is a Trojan horse of a novel, delivering incisive social commentary while it entertains and delights you. I devoured every word of this funny, brilliant book.” —Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train “Wishful Thinking is funny, tender, perceptive―I tore through it with delight.” —Gretchen Rubin, best-selling author of The Happiness Project and Happier At Home Jennifer Sharpe is a divorced mother of two with a problem just about any working parent can relate to: her boss expects her to work as though she doesn’t have children, and her children want her to care for them as though she doesn’t have a boss. But when, through a fateful coincidence, a brilliant physicist comes into possession of Jennifer’s phone and decides to play fairy godmother, installing a miraculous time-travel app called Wishful Thinking, Jennifer suddenly finds herself in possession of what seems like the answer to the impossible dream of having it all: an app that lets her be in more than one place at the same time. With the app, Jennifer goes quickly from zero to hero in every part of her life: she is super-worker, the last to leave her office every night; she is super-mom, the first to arrive at pickup every afternoon; and she even becomes super-girlfriend, dating a musician who thinks she has unlimited childcare and a flexible job. But Jennifer soon finds herself facing questions that adding more hours to her day can’t answer. Why does she feel busier and more harried than ever? Is she aging faster than everyone around her? How can she be a good worker, mother, and partner when she can’t be honest with anybody in her life? And most important, when choosing to be with your children, at work, or with your partner doesn’t involve sacrifice, do those choices lose their meaning? Wishful Thinking is a modern-day fairy tale in which one woman learns to overcome the challenges—and appreciate the joys—of living life in real time. Author: Kamy Wicoff Publication Date: April 21, 2015 -
It's 2014 and Amy Daughters is a forty-six-year old stay-at-home mom living in Dayton, Ohio. She returns to her hometown of Houston over the Thanksgiving holiday to discuss her parents’ estate—and finds herself hurled back in time. Suddenly, it’s 1978, and she is forced to spend thirty-six hours in her childhood home with her nuclear family, including her ten-year old self. Over the next day and a half she reconsiders every feeling she’s ever had, discusses current events with dead people, gets overserved at a party with her parent’s friends, and is treated to lunch at the Bonanza Sirloin Pit. Besides noticing that everyone is smoking cigarettes, she’s still jealous of her sister, and there is a serious lack of tampons in the house, Amy also begins to appreciate that memories are malleable, wholly dependent on who is doing the remembering. In viewing her parents as peers and her siblings as detached children, she redefines her difficult relationships with her family members and, ultimately, realizes that her life story matters and is profoundly significant—not so much to everyone else, perhaps, but certainly to her. Amy’s guide said her trip back in time wouldn’t change anything in the future, but by the time her thirty-six hours are up, she’s convinced that she’ll never be the same again. Publication Date: June 4, 2019 Author: Amy Weinland Daughters
