November Recommended Reads

Engineering a Love Story, Kathleen Reidy

At the height of the boom, ambition is easy —love is the real gamble

It’s the year 2000—dot-coms, Bush v. Gore, and sky-high San Francisco rents. But while the country swoons with irrational exuberance, Chelsea Lefevre’s life is deflating faster than a tech bubble.

She’d had everything she thought she was supposed to want: a house on Boston’s North Shore, exquisite wedding china, a Waspy mother-in-law. A safe, steady marriage.

But after a mortifying slip-up, Chelsea finds herself heading into the 21st century alone. Her lifeboat? A new job advising tech execs, taken to escape the misogyny she endured as a software engineer—only to discover she has a surprising knack for spotting the next hot thing.

Determined just to stay afloat, Chelsea doesn’t have time to wonder if anything beyond safe and steady is possible.

Then, on a West Coast assignment, she meets Seth Murphy, a magnetic sales executive at one of the country’s hottest startups. Professional boundaries make him off-limits, but she can’t resist his pull. What begins as a secret, casual affair soon jeopardizes Chelsea’s career, her newfound independence—and her heart.

Witty and warm, Engineering a Love Story questions how much a smart woman can risk when she’s the only female in the room.

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Under An Indiana Sky, Lynne Hugo

We all know someone whose life has been touched.

Denise has been suspicious of her sister Angie’s boyfriend, Brock, from the start and not only because Angie wants time off from caring for their disabled mother to date him, which means Denise has to pick up the slack. Exactly what “business” is this shady guy in? Even Brock’s mother Nora, a widowed, well-known artist enjoying her new romance, would like to know that.

Only a few observant people have an idea what might be going on after Angie is injured and pain pills are prescribed at the hospital. Denise’s daughter Julie, just fourteen, notices as Angie sickens. Mercedes, a bar keeper friend to Brock, realizes what he’s into and then, the danger he’s in–and why.

One of them will die. And then another.

The police will call that death an accident, too. But maybe they didn’t see a reason to consider murder? Can the guilty and the betrayed survivors trust and forgive each other? Enough to work together to bring the biggest dealer to justice? Are hope and tenderness ever possible again?

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The House in the Middle of the Street, Jennifer Sklias-Gahan

In The House in the Middle of the Street, Jennifer Sklias-Gahan conjures a haunting modern fairy tale of inheritance, secrets, and the creatures we invite into our lives.

When Rebecca and her husband inherit a stately old home, they imagine it as the perfect place to build their family. But as the seasons turn, shadowy visitors begin to arrive—children who are not what they seem, guests with appetites beyond bread. Bound by ancestral debts and ancient instructions, Rebecca and her descendants are drawn into a chilling cycle of desire, duty, and haunting.

With prose that shimmers like a spell and imagery as vivid as a fever dream, Sklias-Gahan offers a dark winter tale that recalls the cautionary power of the Brothers Grimm while speaking directly to the anxieties of our time.

The House in the Middle of the Street is a gothic exploration of legacy, survival, and the perilous cost of letting others in.

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Price Of Silence, Elise Hart Kipness

In this high-octane ride into the depths of high society, a TV news reporter prepares to make her mark in the cutthroat media scene—and unwittingly drags her own family’s secrets into the spotlight.

Sydney Price may have the means, but she has no intention of pulling her stepfamily’s powerful strings to fulfill her ambitions. Determined to make it as a reporter on her own merit, she refuses to take the seat waiting for her at New York’s Glenmont Media.

But even as she settles into her new job at a rival network, she can’t shake her legacy.

When a colleague dies, suddenly and suspiciously, Sydney follows her instinct to dig. But a massive storm is bearing down on Manhattan, and she’s on deck to cover it. Further complicating matters are her ex-boyfriend’s name—it keeps surfacing where it shouldn’t—and her family’s connection to incidents that threaten to unravel everything they’ve built.

As the conspiracy deepens and the newsroom closes in, Sydney finds herself up against the clock. Caught up in a web of lies and family secrets, she races to discover the truth…before she becomes the next victim.

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One of Us Must Die, Zelly Ruskin

For fans of Kimberly Belle and Apple TV+’s Bad Sisters, a domestic suspense exploring the lengths a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage by an ironclad trust fund clause will go to in order to escape her greedy, gaslighting husband.

She married for love. He married for trust. Specifically, her trust fund—the one with the iron-clad “no divorce, no matter the circumstances” clause her mother insisted on.

Sterling (not as good as gold) has always come second to her family’s wealth—but unlike her mother, she’ll do anything to protect her three children. For years, she’s kept up the perfect family illusion to shield them from their manipulative, gaslighting father. But now her husband is becoming more reckless, and her children more exposed. And when her daughter’s fiancé says he wants a marriage just like hers, Sterling knows her charade has gone too far.

To free herself, she must outwit her husband and the legal ties meant to trap her—before it’s too late. Because in this family, there’s only one way out: One of them must die.

“One of Us Must Die is a taut domestic thriller about generational wealth, marriage, and the slow erosion of morality. A truly chilling and thought-provoking read!”—Wendy Walker, USA Today best-selling author of Blade

“Zelly Ruskin has written another absolute stunner of a novel. It felt like I was right next to Sterling, kept in suspense as she uncovered layer upon shocking and twisty layer of her marriage. I can’t wait to read Zelly’s next book.”—Barbara Bos, managing editor of Books by Women

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The Big Day: Saying “I Do” Only to Discover I Didn’t – Another Mostly True Memoir, Lisa Cheek

For fans of Sloane Crosley, a sharp, funny memoir from the acclaimed author of Sit, Cinderella, Sit about love, commitment, and whether she’s ready for marriage right before turning fifty.

For years, Lisa Cheek has believed long-term commitment isn’t in her genes. Her romantic history has followed a familiar pattern: date a lot and widely, but never settle down. When anyone has wanted to marry her, she’s run away. So even she is surprised when, at forty-nine, she finally says “yes” to a proposal and commits fully to her boyfriend, Big Johnson. But when she finds out on their wedding day, after the vows, that they aren’t actually married, she hesitates. Should she take this as a sign to run while she still can?

In The Big Day, Lisa Cheek invites us inside one unforgettable wedding day, with its attending hilarity, chaos, and unexpected turns. As everything begins to unravel she looks back on a lifetime of relationships—her own and those of her family and friends—searching for patterns, meanings and the truth about what makes love last.

Witty, unflinching and deeply relatable, The Big Day is a memoir about late-in-life love, marriage, and the complicated question so many people face: When it really matters, do you stay or do you go?

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The Summer We Lied, Beverley Harvey

On a fortieth birthday trip to Majorca, long-buried secrets threaten to shatter the bond between three best friends.

Nineteen years ago, Jo Watts’ twin brother Gavin vanished without a trace. Now, with their fortieth birthday approaching – and desperate for answers – she hires a private investigator to uncover what really happened.

As Jo travels to Spain to celebrate with her best friends, Devon and Michelle, tension simmers beneath the surface. Old jealousies are reignited and, as the drinks flow under the Mediterranean sun, the cracks in their friendship begin to show.

Because they’ve all been lying.

Back in London, the investigation into Gavin takes a dangerous turn. And as past and present collide, Jo is forced to confront a devastating possibility: the people she trusts may be the ones with the most to hide.

The closer Jo gets to the truth about her brother, the more dangerous it becomes.

The Summer We Lied is a gripping, twist-filled psychological thriller about friendship, betrayal and the corrosive nature of secrets, perfect for fans of Lucy Foley and Claire Douglas.

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The Pearl Farmers: A Novel, Stacey Gordon

For fans of Ann Patchett, a layered, multigenerational family novel about three sisters carrying on the legacy of their family’s pearl farm in small-town Tennessee.

Three estranged sisters—Helen, Anna, and Penn Lockshire—are bound by the shimmering but fragile legacy of their family’s freshwater pearl farm in rural Tennessee. When the business that once made them famous faces collapse, the sisters are pulled back into each other’s lives and forced to reckon with old betrayals, unspoken resentments, and the complicated truth of their inheritance. Soon, what began as a fight for survival becomes a reckoning with the myths that shaped them and the secrets buried in the family’s past.

From the discovery of a rare pearl in 1981 to the struggles of a failing farm in 2008, the Lockshire sisters must navigate love, loss, ambition, and forgiveness to decide whether their heritage is a blessing to preserve—or a burden to escape.

Rich with emotional depth and anchored by the pearl’s enduring symbolism—a thing of beauty born from irritation—this sweeping story of family, identity, and resilience will captivate readers of Celeste Ng and Claire Lombardo.

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Unfolding the Heart: One Woman’s Quest for True Nature, Rosanne Annoni

For fans of memoirs by spiritual seekers and therapists, a contemporary memoir of healing, loss, and awakening set between East Coast retreats and everyday life.

At the age of ten, Rosanne Annoni had a vision of Christ calling her to become a nun—only to have her devout Catholic mother respond to this news with a slap across the face. Traversing the time between that childhood vision and a solitary winter in Pema Chodron’s cabin at Gampo Abbey, Unfolding the Heart weaves together raw personal storytelling, spiritual discovery, and psychological insight. Through the highs of spiritual clarity and the depths of trauma, she searches relentlessly for her true path—and finds it not in renunciation, but in presence.

Spanning decades of grief, motherhood, cancer, and healing, this memoir explores the messy beauty of a life lived with courageous self-inquiry. Through the Diamond Approach, Buddhist practice, and deep personal relationships, Rosanne unearths wisdom from adversity and uncovers grace in the ordinary. For spiritual seekers, healing professionals, or anyone navigating loss, midlife change, or a desire for inner truth, Unfolding the Heart is a cathartic, hopeful story of letting go, leaning in, and discovering that spiritual path isn’t somewhere far away—it’s right here, within.

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Living with Strangers: Healing a Wounded Heart in a Distant Land—A Memoir, Robin Rosenbluth

A debut memoirist’s hopeful and brave coming-of-age story of surviving a turbulent youth—neglected first by her father, then as a teen in foster care—and going on to find a sense of belonging and a new lease on life in a semi-nomadic Kenyan community.

Eager to leave her life as a foster child behind, Robin Rosenbluth travels to a remote village in northern Kenya called Songa in 1973. As a white college student, she arrives in a desert-like environment to teach elementary school to Samburu and Rendille children. While befriending the residents, she learns to live in a mud hut, survive without modern conveniences, skin a cow, and kill a chicken for dinner.

Robin weaves stories about the challenges she faced growing up—her mother’s early death, her father’s abandonment, and her years in foster care—with her account of her time in Songa. As the only Jewish resident in a village influenced by Christian missionaries, she strives to fit in: adapting to the intense heat, endless insects, and close encounters with wild animals. Over time, she develops close friendships with a local teacher and a woman who becomes her surrogate mother, participates in local customs, and makes a place for herself in Songa.

Offering vivid insight into why a love-starved nineteen-year-old from New York City would choose to relocate to the other side of the world, Living with Strangers is a poignant chronicle of one young woman’s search for a place to belong.

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The Pond Beyond the Forest: Reflections on Childhood Trauma and Motherhood, Shigeko Ito

For fans of Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know, a memoir of a middle-aged Japanese immigrant mother’s struggle to raise her teenage son and save her marriage when she finds herself triggered by memories of her own childhood trauma as he enters adolescence.

At age twenty-two, Shigeko Ito immigrated to America to escape Japan’s rigid society and a neglectful childhood home that landed her in a mental hospital at seventeen. She thrived in her new, healthier environment and thought her traumatic past was all behind her.

Until it wasn’t.

Motherhood, she realized, was far more challenging than she could have ever imagined. But it was her son’s high school years that proved to be particularly daunting, and that was when her past reemerged—in the form of intense flashbacks to her childhood trauma and tumultuous teenage years. With the stream of daily stresses compounded by menopausal irritability, Shigeko often found herself regressing into a bunker-like mentality with childish coping mechanisms, a pattern that threatened to undo her most prized achievement: her happy family.

In The Pond Beyond the Forest, Shigeko faces her past head-on, taking the reader along on her quest to uncover the root causes of her lifelong struggles—a journey that leads to deeper self-awareness, understanding, and acceptance, and ultimately saves her family and marriage.

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Mortal Zin: A Mystery Novel, Diane Schaffer

A crusading attorney’s death. Sabotage at a family winery. Secrets buried in California’s past…

When corporate attorney Noli Cooper visits her godparents’ Santa Cruz Mountain winery, she’s hoping for a few quiet days to consider her future. But the future will have to wait. The body of her childhood mentor, a crusading social justice lawyer and local hero, is discovered in a rocky ocean cove. The sheriff is quick to call it suicide. Noli knows he’s wrong. Teaming up with PI Luz Alvarado, Noli dives into a world where nothing is as it seems.

As threats mount and the winery teeters on the brink of ruin, Noli and Luz must navigate a treacherous landscape of greed, revenge, and long-buried secrets. Their investigation weaves through the rich tapestry of California’s vineyard history, the mystery of zinfandel grapes, and the haunting legacy of the Vietnam War. With a murderer on the loose, predatory neighbors circling, and Noli’s godfather framed for murder, the clock is ticking. Can two fearless women from different worlds unravel the truth before it’s too late?

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Twice the Family: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Sisterhood, Julie Ryan McGue

Growing up as an adoptee and identical twin, Julie McGue will take you on her journey for identity and individuality, searching for answers through tragedy and adversity.

“A heartfelt exploration of connection, community, and the unbreakable bond between sisters . . . Her journey beautifully reminds us of the strength we find within ourselves as we seek to uncover where we truly belong.”— Simone Knego, author of The Extraordinary UnOrdinary You

In this coming-of-age memoir, set in Chicago’s western suburbs between the 1960s and ’80s, adopted twins Julie and Jenny provide their parents with an instant family. Their sisterly bond holds tight as the two strive for identity, individuality, and belonging. But as Julie’s parents continue adding children to the family, some painful and tragic experiences test family values, parental relationships, and sibling bonds.

Faced with these hurdles, Julie questions everything—who she is, how she fits in, her adoption circumstances, her faith, and her idea of family. But the life her parents have constructed is not one she wants for herself—and as she matures, she recognizes how the experiences that formed her have provided her a road map for the person and mother she wants to be.

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Mine Again: Sunflower Book One (Sunflower Series 1), Andrea Thome

“Charming first installment in the Sunflower series.” ~Kirkus Reviews
Delilah Spencer is a rolling stone. A big city attorney from Chicago on a temporary work assignment in Sunflower, Montana.

Ranger Beckham’s Sunflower roots run deep. Three generations to be exact. The high school band director and single father is adrift, fresh out of a marriage of convenience. He’s all but given up on finding true love.

Until he bumps into Delilah, the fixer with trust issues who has a hard and fast rule: never get attached to the places she visits or the people in them. They strike a deal when the chemistry between them burns too hot to ignore, convincing themselves they’ll be able to part as friends when Delilah’s gig is up, no matter how scorching things get between them.

But the slower pace in tight-knit Sunflower is a balm for Delilah’s restless soul, and it becomes impossible to imagine leaving Ranger or Montana behind.

Will Delilah break her own rules and finally put down roots, or will she cut and run when her contract is up, leaving Ranger and the life she never knew she wanted in the rearview mirror?

“Charming first installment in the Sunflower series.” ~Kirkus Review
“Snappy…a charming opposites-attract romance” ~ Booklife review

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Every Precious and Fragile Thing, Barbara Davis

A mother and daughter try desperately to reconcile just as a decades-old secret threatens to shatter their relationship forever in this powerful story from the bestselling author of The Echo of Old Books.

For social worker Mallory Ward, working with at-risk youth is a calling. But when one of her clients is tragically killed, she finds herself at a crossroads. Despite long-held resentments toward her distant mother, Mallory retreats to her childhood home on the Rhode Island coast to contemplate her future. Instead, she’s confronted by her past, not only in the renewed tensions with her mother but in the unexpected appearance of a familiar face—and the wrenching losses that drove her away a decade ago.

Helen Ward’s home is filled with precious keepsakes from her patients, a testament to decades spent caring for the terminally ill. Her work has always come first, though, leaving little time to connect with her daughter. Over the years, the rift between them has become a chasm, so when Mallory appears unannounced, Helen sees it as an opportunity to repair their broken relationship.

But hidden among Helen’s mementos are the keys to her past…and a terrible secret that threatens to destroy the fragile new trust between them forever.

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Radical Return: Reclaiming My Body Through Coffee, Drugs, Dance, and Psychoanalysis, Natalie R Cohen

Radical Return fuses personal storytelling with professional insight to explore the transformative potential of psychedelics. A memoir-in-essays tracing Natalie’s experience healing from sexual violence, ancestral trauma, medical trauma, and institutional betrayal, this fearless reflection challenges the medicalized narrative of healing. Clinical psychologist Dr. Natalie R. Cohen recounts her recovery through guided journeys with ketamine, MDMA, psilocybin, and ayahuasca.

But the real story unfolds after the medicine fades-through dance, ritual, tattooing, dreamwork, and psychoanalytic reckoning. Blending lived experience with clinical insight, Cohen centers a woman’s body as both witness and site of transformation. Urgent, embodied, and culturally resonant, Radical Return offers a new blueprint for integration-one rooted not only in science, but in voice, movement, and a radical return to one’s whole self.

Where BODY, MIND, HEART, and SPIRIT meet.

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All That I’m Asking, Ellen Halter

It’s the summer of 1968 when Alice Kaplan, a twenty-year-old college student, is assaulted by her chauvinistic boss during a dizzying date on a Ferris wheel. She fights him off and runs home only to find her father has suddenly died of a heart attack. Unable to continue her undergraduate education at Cornell, she is catapulted into the working world where opportunities for a young woman are scarce. Struggling against the sexism of the era, a grief-stricken and naive Alice—who longs to be a writer—stumbles into the tumultuous life of a countercultural newspaper reporter in New York City.

Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, second-wave feminism, and the gay rights movement, All That I’m Asking is a fast-paced novel where one woman’s resilience and tenacity leads to liberation.

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Nothing to Discuss: Breaking from 20 Years of Intimate Partner Violence,  Joanne E. Betzler

For almost twenty years, Joanne’s husband dragged their family city to city in search of the perfect job, the perfect lifestyle. His imposed prurient and alcoholic tendencies slowly eroded her confidence, her sense of self, and thwarted her every quest for a career.

As her sister’s funeral winds down, a simple phone call offering her temporary employment cracks open a window of friendship, discovery, and growth.

Nothing to Discuss reads like a novel and weaves three distinct threads as the author navigates her grief while reconciling past challenges with her enlightened new world. Friendship and trust develop at work. Confiding in her boss helps her gain insight into her controlling, alcohol-riddled marriage. Her emotional growth gives Joanne confidence to claim the agency she seeks.

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Merry, Susan Breen

A mother’s valiant efforts to bring her family the joy of Christmas go haywire when she finds herself haunted by the angry ghost of Charles Dickens.

This sparkling, cozy novel is perfect for readers of Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow and anyone who looks forward to watching It’s a Wonderful Life each December!

Merry Bingham used to love Christmas—until she started worrying all the time about family, money, and death. The only thing that continues to bring her joy is reading from her heirloom edition of A Christmas Carol, autographed by Charles Dickens himself and passed down through five generations of her family. Now, as she waits for the results of the medical tests that will tell her whether this Christmas season will be her last, Merry prepares to give her book to the next generation. Except none of her three children wants it.

Merry refuses to surrender Christmas or Dickens without a fight, so she sells the book and uses the money to take her family to London. She will fill them with Christmas joy even if she has to cram it down their throats.

But the harder Merry pushes, the worse everything gets. Her children erupt into vicious arguments, her gentle husband stops talking to her, her deluxe rental apartment is not what was promised. Oh, and she keeps seeing the ghost of Charles Dickens around town—and he is not happy with her.

Fans of family stories, classic literature, Christmas novels, and holiday season magic will adore Merry.

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The Perfection Campaign: A Daughter’s Search for Acceptance, Jill Vanneman

For readers of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, a debut memoir about a woman born into a conservative family who spends decades grappling with self-acceptance and her parents’ conditional love—until she finally learns how to love herself.

Born with a cleft lip into an upper-middle-class, conservative family obsessed with image and success, Jill Vanneman was subjected early to a “perfection campaign” aimed at erasing flaws.

Told with unflinching honesty, moments of wit, and emotional depth, this coming-of-age story unfolds against the backdrop of 1980s America—a time and place where being a lesbian could cost you your job, your family, and your sense of self. As she grows into adolescence, college, and early adulthood, Jill begins to question not only her place in her family but also her sexual identity. Her journey leads her through turbulent relationships, professional achievements shadowed by internalized shame, and a heartbreaking attempt to reconcile with disapproving parents. Gradually, through therapy, spiritual exploration, and painful introspection, Jill learns that healing doesn’t come from perfection but from embracing the flawed, fierce truth of who she is.

A raw, deeply personal memoir of family expectations, social shame, and a relentless drive for perfection, The Perfection Campaign is a compelling testament to resilience, identity, and the high cost—and ultimate liberation—of living authentically.

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Life Ends, Love Remains: A Revolutionary Ghost Story, Sarah Branson

Ridgefield, Connecticut. A cemetery. A Revolutionary War soldier. A ghost. A writer. 1777 meets 2024.

Clara Donovan, a divorced novelist, moves into her late grandmother’s Connecticut home after a failed marriage and a failed book. She wants silence and a second chance.

Benjamin Whitlock, a woodworker turned soldier for a day, killed at the Battle of Ridgefield on April 27, 1777, has haunted the local cemetery for two hundred and forty-seven years. He wants to be heard.

Eliza Hartwell, dead since 1851, has been weeping in that same cemetery for one hundred and seventy-three years. She wants her story told before it disappears entirely.

When Clara agrees to write Eliza’s story- a love erased from history, a family torn apart, and a theft that has kept her weeping for nearly two centuries- she sets in motion a love story she never anticipated. One conducted entirely across the uncrossable distance between the living and the dead.

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The Family Behind the Girl Scouts of America: Lives of the Kinzie-Gordon Clan, 1750s-1950s,  Melissa Langley Biegert

2026 NYC Big Book Awards – Distinguished Favorite

In 1912, Juliette “Daisy” Gordon Low launched what became one of the 20th century’s most successful organizations for girls, eclipsing the generations of male politicians, business leaders, and scoundrels who had brought prosperity and notoriety to her family. Her parents’ marriage united two leading American families–the Northern Kinzies and the Southern Gordons–and nearly ruptured because of the U.S. Civil War, yet their unwavering love and support, as well as that of her siblings, helped her to overcome physical challenges and a scandalous divorce battle that shocked Victorian society.

Spanning 200 years across multiple continents and told for the first time in its entirety, this account of the Kinzie-Gordon family encompasses Scottish immigrants, numerous famous figures, Indigenous cultures, and enslaved workers. Their story reflects the history of the United States itself through tragedy, triumph, and love.

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The Price of Breathing, Melanie Faith

Some loves wait a lifetime to return.

“This is a tender, beautifully woven and expertly crafted story told in poems about the power of first loves, long marriages, the ache of illness, and the way feelings and actions from the past linger in all of us.” -Antonia Albany, author of Around the Corner, Up Ahead

Meet Helen and Harry Crawley, a couple living in the American West in 1951. A letter arrives that will detonate their everyday routine and send Harry swiftly traveling East (to Helen’s protest) to visit his ailing first love, Flora, now a polio patient hospitalized in an iron lung.

What follows—in telegrams, free-verse poems, letters, and postcard text—is a timeless look at relationship dynamics, raising questions about the strength and meaning of first love long after the sweethearts have parted, the teamwork and ties that bind later-in-life bonds, and the challenges of living with chronic illness.

Will Harry return home to Helen? Should Helen accept his return if he does? Or will Harry’s renewed bond with Flora prove a permanent disruption and the start of a different life for all involved?

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Second Bloom, Christina Hamlett

Who knew that a small tea room, a garden project in progress, and one charmingly opinionated coastal community could brew such a tempest?

Newly widowed Lucy Fischer is expecting a quieter chapter as she prepares to open her cottage door to customers along California’s beautiful Monterey Peninsula. Instead, her new venture attracts a parade of friends, neighbors, busybodies, and well-meaning advisers—each with a theory about how Lucy should live, whom she should see, and, most importantly, what a woman her age has any business doing with romance.

Amidst local politics, garden gossip, and the relentless scrutiny of people who apparently have far too much time to pause for sips and scones, Lucy discovers that starting over is rarely tidy and never happens entirely on one’s own terms. Life can be at once poignant and joyful, daunting and seductive, and beneath all the unsolicited advice and whispered opinions, something unexpected is taking root. Could it be that Fate has a better plan than she might have imagined?

Sometimes true love is closer than we think…perhaps just beyond our own back door.

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Johnny: A Dark Psychological Thriller of Obsession, Control, and Power (Memphis Book 2), Holly May Cormier

Freedom was only the beginning.

With media influence and muscle at his back, he doesn’t chase her.
He rewrites her. Welcome to gaslight nation.

Johnny shifts the lens to the man Memphis fled and what happens when he steps fully into the light.

Told across past and present timelines, this installment unravels Johnny Freedman from the inside out. Raised in a world where power was proven through dominance, alcohol blurred the lines of control, and anger was inherited like a birthright, Johnny learned early how to command a room and a person.

Charming when he needs to be.
Explosive when he isn’t.

Fresh out of prison, he returns more dangerous than ever. Not lurking in the background but moving boldly, strategically, and in plain sight. With a new woman at his side -one who amplifies his image and feeds his need for control, Johnny begins rewriting the story, turning perception into a weapon and positioning himself as something he’s not.

Meanwhile, Memphis is still trying to escape the damage he left behind.

As Johnny becomes entangled with a biker gang, his world expands into something darker, more volatile, and far less predictable. Power, loyalty, and violence collide, revealing just how far he’s willing to go to maintain control, no matter the cost.

This isn’t a love story.
This is the anatomy of obsession.

Dark, gritty, and psychologically intense, Johnny exposes the mind behind the threat and proves that some men don’t chase you…

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1666: A Novel, Lora Chilton

The Survival Story of the Patawomeck Tribe of Virginia told through the lives of two women 

The survival story of the Patawomeck Tribe of Virginia has been remembered within the tribe for generations, but the massacre of Patawomeck men and the enslavement of women and children by land hungry colonists in 1666 has been mostly unknown outside of the tribe until now. Author Lora Chilton, a member of the tribe through the lineage of her father, has created this powerful fictional retelling.

Told in first person point of view through the imagined lives of two women, Chilton tells the harrowing stories of Ah’SaWei WaTaPaAnTam (Golden Fawn) and NePa’WeXo (Shining Moon), members of the surviving Patawomeck tribe, who after the slaughter of their men were sold and transported to Barbados via slave ship. Separated and bought by different sugar plantations, they endured, each plotting their escapes before finally making their way back to Virginia to be reunited with the few members of the tribe that remained.

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People Ruin Everything, Anne Leigh Parrish

The nineteen stories in Anne Leigh Parrish’s People Ruin Everything blend magical realism with love lost and misbegotten. Ornamental statuary takes on a life of its own; a woman learns years later why the man she adored abandoned her; and a devoted daughter-in-law hears a shocking truth about her husband’s father.

Throughout run the themes of broken marriages and those on the brink; missed chances, irreconcilable differences, and secrets hiding in plain sight. These are stories that lay bare passion and despair in souls searching for redemption, acceptance, and a moment’s kindness.

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Crypto Island: A Memoir of Midlife Relocation to Puerto Rico, Georgine Hodgkinson

For fans of Stephanie Land and Glennon Doyle, a debut memoir of a woman who dives into cryptocurrency trading after relocating to Puerto Rico midlife—and along the way transforms her past struggles with poverty and substance abuse into wisdom.

Georgine had built a life of careful control. As a wife, mother, and college professor, she minimized risk and played by the rules. Her attorney husband was successful, her four grown daughters were thriving, and her students knew that hard work and deadlines mattered. Having survived a turbulent adolescence marked by poverty and substance abuse, she believed in the safety of well-ordered environments.

Then the pandemic upended everything. When classrooms and offices closed, Georgine and her husband Mark relocated to Puerto Rico, where she discovered a flourishing—and often outrageous—cryptocurrency community. As she navigated the mysteries of crypto trading and uncovered the political complexities woven into the fabric of the beautiful Caribbean island she now called home, Georgine embarked on a journey that would shatter her orderly existence—and force her to revisit the dangerous youth that had shaped her complicated relationship with home, risk, and money.

A memoir about facing past mistakes and embracing second chances, Crypto Island reminds us that personal growth never stops, and that living authentically often demands both resilience and reinvention.

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Our Long Goodbye: A Daughter, a Father, a Best Friend, and the Journey Through Alzheimer’s, Teri Roche Drobnick

In this deeply emotional memoir, a grieving daughter bonds with her father’s best friend of eighty years—and reconnects with her father—through the stories her unlikely new friend shares with her.

From the moment Teri Drobnick’s father is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she feels like he’s slipping away. As she grapples with an uncertain future and the steady erosion of his memory, Teri leans on Uncle Bob—her dad’s best friend of eighty years.

As Teri navigates the emotional limbo of caring for a parent with dementia, she and Uncle Bob, united by mutual grief, form a deeper bond from the stories he shares of his lifelong friendship with her father. Beginning with their boyhood during World War II, Uncle Bob recounts first dates, college at UC Berkeley, marriages, building a business, raising children, surviving loss. In the present, Teri confronts the anger, loneliness, and role reversal that accompany memory decline—but through tales of the past, she finds a way to reconnect with her father.

With a narrative braided between past and present, Our Long Goodbye is a poignant love letter from a daughter to her father that explores anticipatory grief, enduring friendship, and the profound power of shared memory.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing