Kudzu salesman James T. Cullowee arrives in Cooper County, North Carolina in the spring of 1941 to spread the gospel of kudzu. It can apparently feed cattle, improve soil, grow with no effort, be turned into jam, and cure headaches.

I Meant to Tell You, by Fran Hawthorne (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022) opens during a conversation between Miranda Isaacs and her fiancé, Russ, who is going through an FBI security check as a prelude to getting his dream job in the U.S. Attorney’s office.

Stephen Cane is a guitarist – he’s already walked out on one band to join another one that subsequently falls apart. He gets himself to New York City to try to rejoin his first band, the one headed by his best friend and former bandmate, Dylan John. It’s 1967, drugs and girls are everywhere, Dylan is on the verge of becoming a rock n’ roll star, and Stephen makes some extremely poor choices.

Charles Lindbergh and his wife were out on the night of the kidnapping, but the nanny was home. After the baby disappeared from his bed, that nanny, Betty Gow, became a prime suspect, and her life was never the same. She was known thereafter as the Lindbergh Nanny.

The Lake on Fire is about whom to love, the struggle between rich and poor, and the choices we make about how to live in an unfair world. Although set in the 19th century, Rosellen Brown’s writing, as intriguing and luminous as Chicago’s “White City,” has something to say about our still unfair, turbulent times.

Since being sold into slavery as a child and working her way up to becoming concubine and mistress for several different men, Lady Juliana's survival has depended on her allure. Then her place in the world is shattered by a debilitating illness and she is spurned by the entire Polish royal court.

This book introduced the intrepid 11-year-old protagonist, Flavia de Luce, who lives in an enormous manor house in England, with her widowed father and two sisters. It’s 1950, and England is still rebuilding itself after WWII.

Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970) was born in Buczacz, Eastern Galicia (now part of Ukraine). Yiddish was the language of his home, and Hebrew the language of the Bible and the Talmud which he studied formally until the age of nine. Considered one of the greatest Hebrew writers, in 1966, Agnon was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

When the Princess Alice pleasure boat collides with a huge iron-hulled cargo ship on the Thames River, it’s split in half, and only 130 of the 650 passengers and crew members survive. It’s 1878, and clues point to sabotage by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which has already used violence in hopes of restoring Home Rule.

Sharifa and her husband Murtuza are spending his sabbatical year in Mumbai with their seven-year-old daughter, Zeenat. While Murtuza teaches, Shari is planning to homeschool Zee, reconnect with her family, and research her great-great grandfather with hopes of creating a family history. But Sharifa’s cousins, with whom she was once close, are at odds.

Californian Claire Easton, who writes a magazine column called “The Anglophile’s Notebook,” travels to England to do research for a book about Charlotte Brontë. She’s already in love with England, where her late mother grew up and where she plans to find some healing now that her marriage of twenty years is imploding.

When Anne Louise Bannon heard her husband, then archivist for the City of Los Angeles, speak about the how early Angelenos dug a large ditch (a zanja) to cull water from the Porciuncula River (now known as the Los Angeles River), her first thought was that the Zanja would be an interesting place to find a dead body.

With gripping portrayals of fathers and sons, mothers and siblings, passion and pain – this is a moving, non-linear novel about the relationships to family and society upon which all humanity rests.

Inspired by Leona Woods, the only woman who worked on the Manhattan Project, Atomic Love (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2020) tells the story of Rosalind Porter, a physicist recruited by Enrico Fermi to join his team at the University of Chicago.

In John DeSimone's Road to Delano (Rare Bird Books, 2020), it's 1968, and Cesar Chavez is organizing the United Farm Workers to fight for decent working conditions and basic human rights, while growers get increasingly violent in trying to prevent unionization.