Today I talked to Chikodili Emelumadu about Dazzling (Harry N. Abrams, 2023).

Sparks fly in Megan Staffel’s novel, The Causative Factor (Regal House 2024), when Rachel is randomly paired with Rubiat, a fellow student, for an assignment in their college art class.

Hermine “Herself” Zook is a healer who rules over an island in a swampy area of Michigan known as “The Waters.” People, including her three grown daughters, fear her, but her powerful herbal and plant-based medicines have cured the townspeople for decades of viruses, pains, and unwanted pregnancies.

Today I talked to Esinam Bediako about here novel Blood on the Brain (Red Hen Press, 2024).

In 1979 during her freshman year at Denver East High School in 1979, Suzanne’s mother was murdered by an armed robber while working in her record store.

In Sara Johnson Allen's novel Down Here We Come Up (Black Lawrence Press 2023), Kate Jessup’s mother lures her back home to North Carolina.

A beautiful dual-timeline novel about the Yemenite community struggling in overcrowded immigrant camps in 1950’s Israel, family bonds, mother-daughter relationships, political realities in 1995 Israel, and a young woman learning to be honest with herself.

Set around the globe in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, Leegant’s characters face loneliness, illness, difficult relationships, horrible memories, unfaithful husbands, and uncaring or dying parents. These are moving stories about recognizable people, all facing displacement in one way or another, trying to live their lives.

Virginia is a single mother of an autistic child with a disinterested ex-husband and a demeaning, dead ended job as an adjunct professor on three different college campuses. She struggles, barely able to get by with no end in sight. Then she learns that the man who murdered her father when she was a little girl, has just gotten paroled despite his life sentence. Virginia remembers the day her life changed because of Travis Hilliard and decides to confront him. She brings her gun.

INSIDE THE MIRROR centers on twin sisters growing up in 1950s Bombay, who aspire to become artists. The family is still recovering from the Partition of India in 1947, especially the twins’ grandmother, who once fought for justice against the British regime.

Mrs. Lowe-Porter is a fictional retelling of the life of the author’s grandmother-in-law, who sidestepped the boundaries placed on women of the early 20th century to spend over three decades translating the books and stories of literary giant, Thomas Mann. Lowe-Porter’s translations led to worldwide acclaim that earned Mann the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, but she dreamed of being a published author in her own right and struggled to find her own voice.

It’s 1905, and there’s a bounty on the heads of Ruby Calhoun and Pip Quinn for trumped-up crimes they didn’t commit in Kansas. When a wannabe movie producer convinces them to star in a moving picture about their exploits, everyone’s lives are put in danger, but Ruby and Pip refuse to back down in this charming, light-hearted series about 1900s life in the west, the early movie industry, and the bonds of friendship.

It’s 2016, after an attempted coup against Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and because of a tip, the police suddenly show up at the office of a young journalist. Nuray, her fellow journalists, and her visiting friend Adalet are thrown into a notorious prison. They’re placed in separate, filthy and horrifying cells, and Adalet has to confront the possibility of never getting out alive. Her Jewish boyfriend has already left Istanbul and is trying to get her to marry him, but Adelet loves her country. Nuray is alone in the world, but she has to confront the father who disappeared from her life and the soldier who wants to see her punished. This is a novel about regular people trying to live their lives in the aftermath of Turkey’s takeover by a populist, authoritarian leader.

Lorna is a social worker who helps countless depressed and disturbed patients pull their lives together, but she can’t begin to communicate with her miserable 19-year-old son, who will barely communicate and speaks in passive voice. She needs to drive up to Vermont to see to her aging mother, now suffering from a possible broken ankle, and dreads being with her because the mother disappeared without a word when Lorna was a child, and only came back in her life after her son was born. Then there’s her ex-husband out on the west coast – Lorna’s job is communicating, but she hasn’t found a way to do so in her own life.

Rebecca Cohen and her family live in Istanbul, until they lose all their wealth and are forced to leave. It’s also no longer safe for Jews, and many are trying to find a place to go. Rebecca’s father, once a successful businessman, now cleans a synagogue in Barcelona.