April 19, 2024

New Fiction

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio – When Lauren returns home to her flat in London late one night, she is greeted at the door by her husband, Michael.  There’s only one problem- she’s not married.  She’s never seen this man before in her life.  But according to her friends, her much-improved décor and the photos on her phone, they’ve been together for years.  As Lauren tries to puzzle out how she could be married to someone she can’t remember meeting, Michael goes to the attic to change a light bulb and abruptly disappears.  In his place, a new man emerges, and a new, slightly altered life re-forms around her.  Realizing that her attic is creating an infinite supply of husbands, Lauren confronts the question:  If swapping lives is as easy as changing a light bulb, how do you know you’ve taken the right path?  When do you stop trying to do better and start actually living?

The Waves Take You Home by Maria Barrios Velez – Violeta Sanoguera had always done what she was told.  She left the man she loved in Columbia in pursuit of a better life for herself and because her mother and grandmother didn’t approve of him.  Chasing dreams of education and art in New York City, and with a new love, twenty-eight-year-old Violeta establishes a new life for herself, on her terms.  But when her grandmother suddenly dies, everything changes.  After years of being on her own in NYC, Violeta finds herself on a plane back to Colombia, accompanied at all times by the ghost of her grandmother who is sending her messages and signs, to find she is the heir of the failing family restaurant, the very one Abuela told her to run from in the first place.  The journey leads her to rediscover her home, her grandmother, and even the flame of an old love.

A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke – Paris, 1885: Aubry Tourvel, a spoiled and stubborn nine-year-old girl, comes across a wooden puzzle ball on her walk home from school.  She tosses it over the fence, only to find it in her backpack that evening.  Days later, at the family dinner table, she starts to bleed to death.  When medical treatment only makes her worse, she flees to the outskirts of the city, where she realizes that it is this very act of movement that keeps her alive.  So begins her lifelong journey around the world, constantly on the run from her disease, which won’t allow her to stay anywhere more than a few days.  From the scorched dunes of the Calanshio Sand Sea to the snow-packed peaks of the Himalayas; from a bottomless well in a Parisian courtyard to the shelves of a spectacular underground library, we follow Aubry as she learns to survive on her own.  Along the way she will encounter friends, enemies, and lovers; strange beasts, wild landscapes, opulent castles, and grand inventions.  But the longer she wanders, and the more of her unlikely existence she dares to share with others, the clearer it becomes that the world she travels through is not quite the same as everyone else’s.

Stag by Dane Bahr – It’s 1989 and Amos Fielding, onetime sheriff of Oscar, Iowa, is in his early seventies and grieving the recent loss of his wife, Sara.  He packs up his few belongings and heads to a ranch in the far northwest corner of Washington State.  The farther he can get from Oscar and his years there as sheriff, the better.  Eager to escape painful memories, Fielding throws himself into the daily chores of a gentleman rancher.  But there is evil afoot, as dark as any he faced in Oscar.  A cold-blooded psychopath has been stalking troubled young women in the surrounding woods, staging elaborate scenes of his crimes.  The local chief of police has turned a blind eye to the cases.  In fact, the only law enforcement agents genuinely concerned about justice are Dee Batey (a recovering alcoholic and former detective turned wildlife officer) and Philip Wilson (an overly ambitious and weirdly obsessed young Seattle FBI agent).  It is Batey and Fielding’s growing friendship that provides the lure that will pull Fielding back into the world he so desperately wants to escape as the three team up to hunt a killer and stop a predator from finding new prey.