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2016 USA Best Book Awards: Narrative Non-Fiction Winner 2016 Foreward INDIE Awards: War and Military Finalist “Written in an unencumbered, conversational style, this book is partly a personal memoir and partly a study of the ways in which civilians make noble sacrifices out of patriotic commitment. Especially given the United States’ many military engagements around the world, this is a timely and thoughtful offering . . . An Army wife’s absorbing testament to the power of family and faith to weather difficult times.” ―Kirkus Reviews Army Wife: A Story of Love and Family in the Heart of the Army begins in the summer of 1969 when the author meets West Point Cadet Dick Cody. A schoolgirl crush and six years of dating turns into an enduring love story and over thirty years of marriage. Vicki is by Dick’s side every step of the way on his path from lieutenant to four-star general and Vice Chief of Staff of the Army. From the last days of the Vietnam War to the present-day war on terrorism, this memoir honors not just commitment between spouses but a commitment to military life. While the couple raise their two sons, Vicki learns to juggle everyday challenges with everything the Army throws at them: emotional ups and downs, long separations, and many moves. As she comes to embrace the uniqueness of her circumstances over more than three decades in an Army family, she finds joy, self-fulfillment, and pride and never loses sight of who she is as a woman. When their two sons enter the Army after September 11, 2001, Dick is in one of the top leadership positions in the Pentagon. It is all of their years of experiences and their love for each other, that gives them the strength to handle the stress and fear of their sons’ combat deployments. This is also a story about a father and his two sons who follow in his footsteps. Author: Vicki Cody Publication Date: August 16, 2016 -
Stacy Halloran has lived most of her life in 1950s-era housing development Arboria Park. But her beloved neighborhood may not survive much longer. Despite her parents’ entreaties to “stay in the yard where it’s safe,” the Park is where young Stacy roams in quest of “real life.” Through her wanderings, she learns about the area’s agricultural history; meets people from backgrounds different than her own; watches her siblings develop interracial and same-sex relationships; helps launch the local punk-rock scene; and finally, settles as a wife and mother. As the neighborhood declines (along with her relationship with her mother), Stacy considers moving on to rescue herself and her daughter. But then a massive highway project threatens the ever-resilient Park—and it’s Stacy’s task to rally family, friends, and neighbors to save it. Author: Kate Tyler Wall Publication Date: May 2, 2017 -
2016 USA Best Book Awards: General Fiction Finalist “Appetite examines the different ways we seek satisfaction in our lives―some of us are hungry for power, others for love, and some find comfort in duty and tradition. This realistic and engrossing portrait of two generations is a promising first novel with wide appeal.” ―Booklist When Jenn Adler returns from a year in India, she has a surprise for her parents: a young guru from Bangalore whom she intends to marry. Her father, Paul, is wary of this “beggar” Jenn has brought home—who, he suspects, is conning his much-loved daughter—while her mother, Maggie, is frightened that this alien stranger will steal away her only child, her focus in life. In the months leading up to the backyard wedding, Maggie is forced to reevaluate her virtues as she casts about for support, and Paul faces an unexpected threat at work—one that Maggie could help him meet, if he would only ask. But even with these distractions, the two parents are focused on one primary question: Can they convince their daughter she is making a terrible mistake before the wedding takes place? Author: Sheila Grinell Publication Date: May 17, 2016 -
Samantha—the fashionable wife of a successful businessman and doting mother of one—struggles to negotiate the spheres of intimacy between her husband and her family of origin. Samantha loves her husband, Richard, and she loves her sister, Elizabeth. But the two of them can barely exist in the same room, which has caused the entire family years of emotional distress. Yet it’s not until Samantha’s sister is diagnosed at age forty-three with lung cancer that her family and her marriage are tipped into full-blown crisis. A story of love, loss, forgiveness, learning to live with grief, and healing, Appearances will resonate with anyone who has ever experienced tension in their familial relationships—even as it serves as a poignant reminder that no amount of privilege can protect us from family conflicts, marital difficulty, or mortality. Author: Sondra Helene Publication Date: April 9, 2019 -
After her mother’s death, Gabrielle Robinson found two diaries her grandfather had kept while serving as doctor during the fall of Berlin 1945. He recorded his daily struggle to survive in the ruined city—“I creep out at 10 o’clock at night to the clinic under whistling grenades and bombs, a wilderness of fire and dust, behind it, although already high in sky, the blood red moon”—and attempts to do what little he could for the wounded and dying without water, light, bedding, and medications. But then the diaries revealed something that had never been mentioned in her family, and it hit Robinson like a punch to the stomach: Api, her beloved grandfather, had been a Nazi. In this clear-eyed memoir, Robinson juxtaposes her grandfather’s harrowing account of his experiences during the war with her memories of his loving protection years afterward, and raises disturbing questions about the political responsibility we all carry as individuals. Moving and provocative, Api’s Berlin Diaries offers a firsthand and personal perspective on the far-reaching aftershocks of the Third Reich—and the author’s own inconvenient past. Author: Gabrielle Robinson Publication Date: September 15, 2020 -
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 that delays the overlanders more than a month, she—along with eighty-one other members of the Donner Party—finds herself stranded at Truckee Lake on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, stuck there for the entirety of a despairing, blizzard-filled winter. Forced to eat shoe leather and blankets to survive, will Ada be able to battle the elements—and her own demons—as she envisions a new life in California? Researched with impeccable detail and filled with imagery as wide as the western prairie, Answer Creek blends history and hearsay in an unforgettable story of challenging the limits of human endurance and experiencing the triumphant power of love. Author: Ashley E. Sweeney Publication Date: May 19, 2020 -
Timed perfectly to publish just as New York celebrates its 400th birthday, a riveting story of a spirited young mother who faces the unknowns of seventeenth-century New Amsterdam after fleeing the Old World in search of a better life. It’s 1630, and Anneke Jans has just arrived in the fledgling colony of New Netherland with her husband, Roelof, and their two young daughters to create a new life for herself and her family. One of very few women in the colony, Anneke quickly realizes that she will need to make her own rules if she is to survive. When Roelof dies, Anneke marries Everardus Bogardus, the flamboyant minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. With this marriage, Anneke joins the elites of the colony—but when the colony’s new director provokes war with the region’s American Indians and her new husband emerges as the head of the anti-war opposition, she also finds herself in the midst of political turmoil. As difficulties mount, she must rely more than ever on her quick wits to protect herself and her growing family. Based on real events, Anneke Jans in the New World tells the story of an ordinary woman who lived an extraordinary life. Author: Sandra. Freels Publication Date: January 6, 2026 -
Andrea Hoffman is an overeducated, underemployed, and unmotivated recent college graduate—until an unexpected robbery blasts her out of her funk and into a job in the finance world of early-1980s Chicago. At first, it seems like a bad fit. But the world of finance has its own weird charm, and she grows increasingly fascinated by the strange language of trading, the complexity of the stock market, and her colleagues, who navigate it all with a ruthless confidence. Even though she has two strikes against her—Jewish and female—Andrea’s quick wit and strong work ethic propel her into an actual sales job and her career takes off. But this is the Wall Street of the eighties, and along with making a lot more money, Andrea adopts a new, fast life of cocktails, cocaine, and casual sex. Drunk on her achievements, she gradually realizes that at some point, she’s going to have to decide what success really means to her. Author: Diane Cohen Schneider Publication: August 30, 2022 -
If Jake Laurent is the “human equivalent of Friday,” Kat Green is “Monday.” Nevertheless, the two shared a secret (if casual) affair during the pandemic, and now, almost exactly one year later, they’ve reunited in Copenhagen, the “city of fairy tales.” Only neither one of them is living a fairy tale. Jake is a young actor who’s cracking under the public pressure that comes with rising celebrity. Kat is a single mother at the top of her career who believes she’s holding it all together but is barely living. Each one is a simple escape for the other—until the security Kat has worked so hard to build for her tiny family comes under threat, and Jake has to decide if he can keep Kat a secret even if it’s at the expense of his own fame. And They Had a Great Fall is the story of two people who are going through the motions in life—until they finally look inside themselves to figure out what it takes to find a happily ever after. Author: Shelby Saville Publication Date: March 11, 2025 -
“The day after my son died, a bird walked into my house. That tiny sparrow wouldn’t leave me alone. It kept knocking on my door and showing up in my dreams, until it finally sparked a light within me, and then, something so much more.” Linda Broder loses everything when her fifteen-year-old son Brendan dies—her music, faith, and hope. When a bird walks into her house, her husband and children embrace it as a sign from Brendan. But not Linda; she’s too logical to believe in signs. Still, birds keep clinging to Linda’s windows, whispering in her dreams, and showing up in unexpected places, pulling her back to her music and showing her how to stay open to wonder. Full of hope and resilience and the healing magic of music, And Still the Bird Sings is a story about finding sacred wonder in the midst of unimaginable loss, and a reminder of the many ways we can still connect with the ones we’ve lost. This unforgettable memoir will leave you filled with peace and wonder. Author: Linda Broder Publication Date: November 8, 2022 -
After 27 years of motherhood, Rita Lussier’s youngest child heads to New York City and Rita drives home to what she thinks will be the calm after the storm only to find no comfort, nothing familiar. Welcome to the Great Big Empty Nest! The parenting mission that had infused Rita’s days and nights with so much purpose has abruptly changed leaving her lost and confused, not an ideal state of mind to begin the messy and uncomfortable process of reinventing her life. Rekindling her marriage and friendships. Kickstarting her career. Making difficult choices about her house, finances and future all the while adjusting to the ever-changing demands of growing-up children and aging parents. And Now, Back to Me invites readers along as Rita recreates nearly every aspect of her life at a time when she thought she’d be kicking back to enjoy it. As a columnist for The Providence Journal, it was precisely these types of personal glimpses that endeared readers to her column making it a popular feature of the newspaper for a dozen years. In her book, Rita shares her experiences with the issues that not only confront her at this crossroads, but millions of parents as well. Author: Rita Lussier Publication Date: March 25, 2025 -
Sixty-year-old Frances Pia lives alone on a thirty-foot sailboat anchored near Sausalito, where she communes with the fog, sea lions, cormorants, and two sailor friends, Otto and Russell. She performs random acts of public defacement—painting drainpipes, public restrooms, and murals on the sides of houses—which she believes are beautification projects, and struggles with bouts of depression and mania. Frankly, she’s a bit of a nutcase. But Frances wasn’t always this way. She was once a Catholic nun with a sister, Anne, who loved her dearly. But then she slept with her brother-in-law, Greg—and ashamed and pregnant, she fled, leaving Anne, her art, and her vocation behind. When she also lost her baby, Nicola, in a freak accident, she lost faith in God and became a keeper of sorrows. Through a series of wacky adventures, including bouts with the cops and the sea, Frances opens her heart to love for the first time in years—and begins to really paint the town, redeeming herself with Anne and freeing herself from her guilt over Nicola’s death along the way. Author: Barbara Sapienza Publication Date: April 25, 2017 -
Anarchy in High Heels is not a state of dress; it’s a state of mind. A San Francisco porno theater might be the last place you’d expect to plant the seed of a feminist troupe, but truth is stranger than fiction. In 1972, access to birth control and a burn-your-bra ethos were leading young women to repudiate their 1950s conservative upbringing and embrace a new liberation. Denise Larson was a timid twenty-four-year-old actress wannabe when, at an after-hours countercultural event, The People’s Nickelodeon, she accidentally created Les Nickelettes. This banding together of ¬¬like-minded women with an anything-goes spirit unlocked a deeply hidden female humor. For the first time, Denise allowed the suppressed satirical thoughts dancing through her head to come out in the open. Together with Les Nickelettes, which quickly became a brazen women’s lib troupe, she presented a series of feminist skits, stunts, and musical comedy plays. In 1980, The Bay Guardian described the group as “nutty, messy, flashy, trashy, and very funny.” With sisterhood providing the moxie, Denise took on leadership positions not common for women at the time: playwright, stage director, producer, and administrative/artistic director. But, in the end, the most important thing she learned was the power of female friendship. Publication Date: July 27, 2021 Author: Denise Larson -
When Lidia, a blocked Latinx artist in her sixties, goes on a group tour of Namyan, a fictional Southeast Asian country reopened to the world after a long dictatorship, she gets much more than the vacation she thinks she’s signed on for. Against a backdrop of pagodas and enigmatic customs, she and the disparate crew of eighteen Americans on the tour encounter one adventure after other experiences that challenge their assumptions about their host country’s placid surface of beautiful pagodas and wandering Buddhist monks. Along the way, Lidia finds companionship and sexual pleasure with Haynes, a Black man seeking adventure even danger in Namyan. On a nighttime excursion among mysterious ancient buildings, they watch the nighttime sky. Lidia remarks that the stars look upside down–a metaphor for Namyan as a foreign place and for her. She enjoys being with Haynes but is conflicted. The final chapter reveals a secret, the source of her conflict, and her steps towards new freedom. An Upside-Down Sky is cast of characters, including their Namyanese guide, mirrors America: straight, gay, gender-fluid, black, brown, white, progressive, conservative, artistic, repressed, old, young. Some of them accept Nanyam’s charming façade at face value, while others seek to understand the country’s brutal repression by the military and ongoing ethnic conflicts. And most, resistant as they might be to change, are transformed by their time there. Author: Linda Dahl Pub Date: April 19, 2022 -
For fans of Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code and Jacqueline Winspear’s The Consequences of Fear comes a gripping novel, set in post–WWII San Francisco, about a young female newspaper publisher and a story that could change the course of her city’s future. In the jubilant aftermath of Japan’s surrender in World War II, San Francisco erupts in celebration. But for Sandy Zimmer, the thirty-two-year-old widow publisher of the Prospect newspaper, the revelry masks a darker truth. In the chaos of the VJ Day Peace Riot, eleven deaths and six rapes take place. Driven by journalistic integrity and battling her own instincts to maintain peace, Sandy directs her paper to investigate the riot. Her quest for truth pits her against formidable adversaries: her controlling civic-leader father-in-law, the newspaper’s resistant board, and authorities desperate to bury the scandal as they vie to attract the United Nations Headquarters to San Francisco. Based on little-known historical events, An Unlikely Prospect follows Sandy’s fight to find her voice in the male-dominated world of 1945 journalism. As she navigates power dynamics, gender roles, and the steep price of printing the truth, Sandy must confront her own transformation from a people-pleasing widow into a determined publisher willing to challenge the status quo.Author: Shelley Blanton-Stroud Publication Date: August 19, 2025 -
Faced with the possibility of losing their three-day-old second child when she contracts meningitis, Norman and Rita Angelini experience all five stages of grief. Terrified for their daughter, they bargain, plead, and beg for a miracle—and they get one, but it isn’t what they expected: though KiKi survives, her illness results in severe brain damage, and she is ultimately diagnosed with cerebral palsy. In the aftermath of this diagnosis, denial and anger take over. Rita fights to keep her vision of who she thinks KiKi could be, and she channels her energy into searching for a procedure—some therapy—that would change KiKi’s outcome. In pursuit of a cure, the Angelini family treks across the United States and abroad—but somewhere along the way, acceptance of and joy in who KiKi is prevails over the idea of “fixing” her. A memoir of unending hope, faith lost and rediscovered, and unconditional love, An Unexpected Normal offers other parents of children born with a disability hope that joy is always within reach—even in the most challenging of circumstances. Author: Rita T. Angelini Publication Date: February 17, 2025 -
Powerful Circe, daughter of the sun-god Helios, is sad to see Odysseus, King of Ithaca, depart from her island, Aeaea—but her heartbreak is eased after dolphins take her to Delos, where she explores a new love relationship. Circe has a strained relationship with her mother, Perse, but when she finally listens to Perse’s encouragement to seek out the amphibian god Glaucus, she’s glad she’s heeded her advice. Together, the two embark on underwater adventures, and Circe shares with Glaucus her knowledge about the healing and harmful power of herbs. While in Delos, she also meets and befriends Skylla, a local beauty with whom Glaucus is enthralled, although the girl is indifferent. Circe eventually returns to Aeaea, but one day she learns, upon consulting her scrying mirror, that there is trouble in Delos that requires her immediate action. In the turbulent world of gods mingling with mortals, our heroine shifts shapes, flies, and uses her superpowers to reverse the course of evil. In a tangle of love, hate, vengeance, and the final righting of wrongs, a cast of irresistible characters weaves an adventure laced with beauty and terror in An Unexpected Ally—a newly woven set of tales that brings to life ancient Greek myths and revives issues familiar to contemporary readers. Author: Sophia Kouidou-Giles Publication Date: October 3, 2023 -
2015/2016 Sarton Women’s Book Award Shortlist in Historical Fiction 2017 International Book Awards Finalist in Fiction: Historical “In her well-researched novel, Fillmore vividly portrays Amsterdam, Rachel, and her family… An intense tale that gives the tragedies of history a Dutch dwelling and a family name.” ―Kirkus Reviews Rachel Klein hopes she can ignore the Nazis when they roll into Amsterdam in May 1940. She’s falling in love, and her city has been the safest place in the world for Jewish people since the Spanish Inquisition. But when Rachel’s Gentile boyfriend is forced to disappear rather than face arrest, she realizes that everything is changing, and so must she—so, although she is often tired and scared, she delivers papers for the underground under the Nazis’ noses. But after eighteen months of ever increasing danger, she pushes her parents to go into hiding with her. The dank basement where they take refuge seems like the last place where Rachel would meet a new man—but she does. An Address in Amsterdam shows that, even in the most hopeless situation, an ordinary young woman can make the choice to act with courage—and even love. Author: Mary Dingee Fillmore Publication Date: October 11, 2016 -
Though twenty-one-year-old Karla Most manages to bag Saxton Perry, a virtual prince thirty years her senior, she has no idea how to live happily ever after, with or without him. Karla cannot get past her anger at having been deceived by her single, now-dead mother, Mutti, who—supposedly a “Holocaust victim,” complete with tattooed numbers—was in fact a German Christian who got into the United States by falsifying her background. So what does that make her daughter? Before she can answer that question, Karla must track down the actual story of her own existence. Author: Ann Z. Leventhal Publication Date: August 22, 2017 -
In 1999, Juliet Cutler leaves the United States to teach at the first school for Maasai girls in East Africa. Captivated by the stories of young Maasai women determined to get an education in the midst of a culture caught between the past and the future, she seeks to empower and support her students as they struggle to define their own fates. Cutler soon learns that behind their shy smiles and timid facades, her Maasai students are much stronger than they appear. For them, adolescence requires navigating a risky world of forced marriages, rape, and genital cutting, all in the midst of a culture grappling with globalization. In the face of these challenges, these young women believe education offers hope, and so, against all odds, they set off alone―traveling hundreds of miles and even forsaking their families―simply to go to school. Twenty years of involvement with this school and its students reveal to Cutler the important impacts of education across time, as well as the challenges inherent in tackling issues of human rights and extreme poverty across vastly different cultures. Working alongside local educators, Cutler emerges transformed by the community she finds in Tanzania and by witnessing the life-changing impact of education on her students. Proceeds from the sale of this book support education for at-risk Maasai girls. Author: Juliet Cutler Publication Date: September 10, 2019 -
Set in the early 1900s, Among the Beautiful Beasts is the untold story of the early life of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, known in her later years as a tireless activist for the Florida Everglades. After a childhood spent in New England estranged from her father and bewildered by her mother, who fades into madness, Marjory marries a swindler thirty years her senior. The marriage nearly destroys her, but Marjory finds the courage to move to Miami, where she is reunited with her father and begins a new life as a journalist in that bustling, booming frontier town. Buoyed by a growing sense of independence and an affair with a rival journalist, Marjory embraces a life lived at the intersection of the untamed Everglades and the rapacious urban development that threatens it. When the demands of a man once again begin to swallow Marjory’s own desires and dreams, she sees herself in the vulnerable, inimitable Everglades and is forced to decide whether to commit to a life of subjugation or leap into the wild unknown. Told in chapters that alternate between an urgent midnight chase through the wetlands and extensive narrative flashbacks, Among the Beautiful Beasts is at once suspenseful and deeply reflective. Publication Date: June 1, 2021 Author: Lori McMullen -
2013 IndieReader Discovery Awards: Winner, Best Travel Writing When an American woman and her British husband decide to buy a two-hundred-year-old cottage in the heart of the Cotswolds, they’re hoping for an escape from their London lives. Instead, their decision about whether or not to have a child plays out against a backdrop of village fêtes, rural rambles, and a cast of eccentrics clad in corduroy and tweed. Part memoir, part travelogue—and including field guides to narrative-related Cotswold walks–Americashire is a candid, compelling tale of marriage, illness, and difficult life decisions. Author: Jennifer Richardson Publication Date: March 4, 2013 -
“A nuanced portrait of what it means to be a family, with a bit of melodrama but plenty of heart.” ―Kirkus Reviews “A poignant literary pageant of custody battles, alchoholism, religious restraint and family turmoil, this tremendously moving read will leave you in bouts of feels all summer long.” ―Redbook “An emotionally gripping read that explores the deepest of cracks in a dysfunctional family, this poignant book belongs in the hands of every parent this summer.” ―Working Mother Richard and Michael, both three years sober, have just decided to celebrate their love by moving in together when Richard—driven by the desire to do the right thing for his ten-year-old-daughter, Brady, whom he has never met—impulsively calls his former father-in-law to connect with her. With that phone call, he jeopardizes the one good thing he has—his relationship with Michael—and also threatens the world of the fundamentalist Christian grandparents who love Brady and see her as payback from God for the alcohol-related death of her mother. Unable to reach an agreement, the two parties hire lawyers who have agendas far beyond the interests of the families—and Brady is initially trusted into Richard and Michael’s care. But when the judge learns that the young girl was present when a questionable act took place while in their custody, she returns Brady to her grandparents. Ultimately, it’s not until further tragedy strikes that both families are finally motivated to actually act in the “best interests of the child.” Author:Catherine Marshall-Smith Publication Date: June 13, 2017 -
A week after Easter 1973, Lily Vida Wallace is dropped like an immigrant into Greenville, South Carolina, following the lynching of Black church sexton Sam Jefferson. Returning home to Manhattan, Lily toddles further outside her familiar world while continuing theological studies in anticipation of the overturn of a centuries-old, males-only priesthood and struggling anew with her erratic engagement. When her fiancé flees following discovery of professional impropriety and Atlanta attorney Rodney Davis lands in her path, love growing between the two accelerates Lily's understanding as it challenges her naïveté about race. Some two decades later, high-profile interracial nuptials in Oakland, California, become the occasion for a reunion between the now Reverend Vida and Lucius Clay, the fiery journalist she met in South Carolina. Within weeks of their re-meeting, Lucius is dispatched to cover Black church burnings, beginning with Lily’s hometown in Texas. Writer Hilton Als recently commented: “We need to wake up to the fact that America is not one story. It is many, many, many stories.”American Blues offers no neat resolution. Instead, its timely story invites, as it tangles with, readers’ own assumptions and complex experience of race and gender in America. Author: Polly Hamilton Hilsabeck Pub Date: April 12, 2022
