Fiction
Browse our collection of fiction book reviews
Homes
Hayden Thompson (Amazon Kindle KDP)
Hayden Thompson’s Homes is a globe-trotting novel that follows Dr. George Harrington, a British physician and single father who, in 1995, leaves Paris with his twelve-year-old son, Hugo, for a public-health posting in Asia. Spanning twenty-two years, the story moves from the motorbike-clogged streets of Sagen to a regional role in Pitani, conferences in Geneva, a bureaucratic post in Brussels, and finally retirement in Italy and England. Along th...
Read Full Review
Grace Notes
John Cheyenne Wilbur (Atmosphere Press)
John Cheyenne Wilbur’s Grace Notes is autobiographical fiction following Jerry Cradleman, a sensitive New Jersey kid who never quite feels at home anywhere. A soul-crushing week at Bobby Knight’s basketball camp awakens a mysterious dread, and getting cut from his high school team deepens his isolation—until a young minister and his wife offer him refuge, setting him on an unlikely path: Oberlin, Princeton Seminary, ordination, and a hunger minis...
Read Full Review
Domesteaders: Cloud 8.5
Curtis Palmer (FriesenPress)
Curtis Palmer's Domesteaders: Cloud 8.5 is a gleefully eccentric Canadian epic that opens in 1967 and follows teenage BB (Beavan Broderick) as he cycles from Edmonton to Vancouver on a solo “rideabout” into manhood. Robbed and broke, he is taken in by Sam, an Auschwitz survivor and pawn-shop owner who offers unique lessons on the value of objects and their stories. This launches BB into beaver ethology, economics, and a lifelong hunt for his abse...
Read Full Review
Parallel Heartbeats
Ashritta Saran (Notion Press)
Ash, a self-reliant army daughter already used to constant relocation, transfers to Lucknow's St. Xavier's expecting another temporary stop, but a corridor collision with Aaryan, the school's effortlessly charming guitarist, scatters her biochemistry notes and her careful plans in Ashritta Saran’s Parallel Heartbeats. Their chemistry deepens through café study sessions, music room rehearsals, and a sunflower confession, as they survive Shreya’s j...
Read Full Review
Voyagers: Homeland to Heartland
D. L. Norris (Outskirts Press)
Every immigrant story begins with a goodbye, and D. L. Norris turns that goodbye into an unforgettable hymn of hope in her latest book, Voyagers: Homeland to Heartland. The tender, multi-generational saga is inspired by the author’s family history and follows Kittil and Marte Dyrebu, who leave the picturesque community of Svene, nestled within Buskerud County, Norway, in the late 1860s to chase the promise of land and freedom in America. After a...
Read Full Review
Descending Darkness
Martyn Rhys Vaughan (Martyn Rhys Vaughan)
Martyn Rhys Vaughan’s Descending Darkness is a gorgeous collection that blends horror, black comedy, and science fiction. A captured fighter struggles to escape a cell while the ceiling slowly descends on him, armed only with desperation and bedsheets in “A Room with No View.” A smug con man plunges into a haunted manor overnight, wins his bet but loses his sanity in “Alone.” In “Dia de los Muertos,” a walking skeleton named Ralph comes after a h...
Read Full Review
Forgiveness: A Contemporary Women’s Fiction Novel
Susen Edwards (Susen Edwards)
Susen Edwards's Forgiveness opens on New Year's Eve 2020, as seventy-year-old artist Fiona Goldberg marks the fiftieth anniversary of the drunk-driving crash that killed her best friend Melissa, a tragedy punished with a mere two-hundred-dollar fine. Fiona realizes she has lived with undiagnosed PTSD for five decades. In 1969, she met Reuben Goldberg, an anti-war activist whose Vietnam draft notice led the couple to Toronto in 1971. There, Fiona...
Read Full Review
ADHD in D Minor: A Collection of Short Stories
Zoé Mahfouz (North Meridian Press)
Few books capture the chaos of a restless mind quite like ADHD in D Minor, Zoé Mahfouz's new and compelling collection of satirical short fiction. The book delivers forty-one short stories and skewers everything from literary elitism to Hollywood gatekeeping, TED Talks, wellness culture, and the endless noise that populates pop culture, to WhatsApp group chats. These are told through the enthralling voice of a neurodivergent narrator who refuses...
Read Full Review
Grunts, Gramps & Tanks: A Soldier’s Tales
Rick Bogdan (Bookbaby)
Rick Bogdan’s Grunts, Gramps & Tanks: A Soldier’s Tales follows the unpredictable journey of a disillusioned Chicago retail buyer, Tyler Gordon Willett, who impulsively enlists in the infantry in 1975 without telling his wife, Nancy. The teenage recruits at Fort Polk nickname him “Gramps” as he survives basic training, memorably marked by the “Private Dickhead” payday incident. He also endures the OSUT program, where a tank commander’s sweaty...
Read Full Review
Into the Eye
James Houston Turner (Regis Books (an imprint of Ruby Rock Films))
James Houston Turner’s Into the Eye is a geopolitical thriller that introduces former KGB colonel Aleksandr Talanov, who is thrust into the heart of a diabolical human-trafficking network in central Africa. Tasked with the covert KTAC team, Talanov must locate and rescue Dr. Shawni Juma, a virologist who has uncovered evidence linking the brutal warlord Ojo Mutebi to the wealthy communist ideologue Istvan Szabo. When a rescue helicopter is betray...
Read Full Review