The Dazzling Truth [Graydon House, August 2020], Hellen Cullen’s poignant novel chronicling an Irish family’s saga across three decades, has been described as “a love letter to family and to the arts” by Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones. It has also earned an incredible starred review from Library Journal, which says: “Perfectly drawn by Cullen (The Lost Letters of William Woolf), an Irish author living in London, whose time (read more…)

In the debut dual-narrative The Last Story of Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim [Park Row, September 2020], a young woman returns to her childhoom home in L.A. for a brief visit, only to find herself having to investigate the fate of her immigrant mother, Mina. The novel is both a love letter from the author to her own mother and a poignant survival story of immigrant women—in this case, (read more…)

Escape into a thriller with a fresh premise, by an author with an enviably authory name: Someone’s Listening [Graydon House, July 28] by Seraphina Nova Glass. The novel’s hero, Dr. Faith Finley, is what they call “the whole package”: she’s a young, beautiful renowned psychologist, host of the wildly popular “Someone’s Listening with Dr. Faith Finley,” and a soon-to-be bestselling author. And of course she’s married to the perfect man, (read more…)

It is mindboggling that a relatively harmless social network in L.A. called the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners–bound by rock ‘n’ roll and born simply out of a survival instinct by El Salvadorean immigrants who fled violence in their native country–would become the street gang known as MS-13. But this definitive account is not a mere historical rundown of the gang’s roots–it is also the story of a former MS-13 member and (read more…)

Beloved YA author Adi Alsaid is back with WE DIDN’T ASK FOR THIS [Inkyard Press, April 7], a timely novel for the earth-lovers in all of us. Meet the students of the elite Central International School (Go sea cucumbers!): every year, they wait with great anticipation for the school’s legendary annual lock-in. But little do they know, any plans of glory are about to be disrupted by a small group (read more…)