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Carry the Weight
Joshua Teixior (Curti Publishing)
Most leadership books open with a hero’s story, but Carry the Weight opens with a manager who became the boss he used to hate. Joshua Teixidor is a top sales rep promoted for hitting numbers, but he nearly loses his best people by confusing pressure with leadership. That is, until a rep named Melissa tells him he is not coaching anyone. That moment becomes an epiphany for him: you don't become a leader when you get the title. You become one when...
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The Cursed
Costi Gurgu (Kult Books)
Costi Gurgu’s The Cursed is a rollicking blend of sci-fi horror and space opera. When headstrong young archaeologist and the heiress of Warwick Galactic Enterprises, Jo Warwick, leads a dig in the Carpathian Mountains on a quarantined Earth, she accidentally awakens an ancient curse: a bio-weapon engineered millennia ago to destroy a godlike alien civilization. Her crew mutates into insectile monsters, and Jo survives only as the curse’s unwillin...
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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...
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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...
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The Sands Shall Witness
Walter Hurst Williamson (BookBaby)
Walter Hurst Williamson’s The Sands Shall Witness is set in German South West Africa from 1903 to 1905. The story follows Conrad Huber, a penniless, shy young German who accepts a job as aide to the colony's commissioner. He hopes to lift his mother out of poverty. Instead, he tumbles into a tinderbox of scheming soldiers, resentful tribes, and the genocidal General von Trotha. The Herero and Nama genocide is in full swing. Then there is Sybille,...
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And No One Knew
Jennifer Manocherian (MindStir Media)
And No One Knew by Jennifer Manocherian is a character-driven thriller that surprises at many levels. It follows Gertrude Sidenstricker, a reclusive sixty-nine-year-old New Yorker who has spent her life hiding behind cover-up makeup for a facial birthmark and her late parents’ warnings that people cannot be trusted. The tall, plain, large-boned elderly woman wears a faded bun, rimless glasses, and a large hemangioma that covers most of her left c...
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Abbreviated Minor
Stan Fairbank (Pava Press)
S. Fairbank’s Abbreviated Minor is a big-hearted coming-of-age novel about Sergio “Serge” Durán. He is an intelligent young man obsessed with music. He is uprooted from Oakland in 1968 when his free-spirited mother impulsively relocates the family to hippie paradise Big Sur. Eight years later, sixteen-year-old Serge is abandoned outright. His mother cancels their lease and flies to India with Guru Sri Bakavash, “a racketeering, tax-cheating, seri...
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Echoes Of Vienna The Long Silence
Stu Moss (Stu Moss)
Stu Moss’ Echoes of Vienna: The Long Silence opens in Vienna in 1937, where Dr. Samuel Schneiderman, his nurse wife Leah, their four children, and grandparents Peter and Helga. The family shares Sabbath dinners and small daily joys even as brownshirts begin marching past their window. From there, the novel traces the family’s unraveling with devastating patience: the Anschluss, Kristallnacht's shattered glass, fifteen-year-old Jacob’s desperate e...
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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...
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Expanded Awareness: A Health Psychologist’s Inquiry into AI and Consciousness
Sophie Guellati-Salcedo, Ph.D. (SGS Quantum Press)
What happens to a mind that thinks alongside a machine that responds with spontaneity? That question is cleverly explored in Expanded Awareness: A Health Psychologist's Inquiry into AI and Consciousness, the third volume in Sophie Guellati-Salcedo’s acclaimed series. She is a practicing health psychologist who approaches artificial intelligence neither as a technologist nor a doomsayer but as a clinician of human behavior, asking not what AI is,...
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