Set mostly in a clinic for migraine sufferers run by a concerned doctor and funded by a wealthy widow, Pain of Pleasure is about tending and being tended, striving and obsession. The widow hires a nurse to spy on the doctor, who is obsessed with a former patient. And the hurricane battering the church where the clinic is housed is a metaphor for the pounding, inescapable torture of relentless headaches.

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.

"Starling is 19 and was raised in a camper van by a strong-willed mother who cut them off from their community of fellow travelers. Starling, who has never gone to school or to the dentist, knows the nomadic life of trapping rabbits, foraging for food, and getting kicked out by local police."

In her new novel Pigs, Johanna Stoberock has written a lyrical fable about an island that receives all the world’s garbage. That garbage, both physical and psychological in the forms of dreams and memories, is consumed by six enormous, voracious pigs.

Two sisters are struggling to save their land when a gas well explodes on a neighboring ranch in western Colorado, setting off a disturbing chain of events. This is a moving debut novel about family, land, and the preservation of both in rural America.

It’s 1937 and rural Tennessee is still recovering from the Great Depression. The construction of a huge dam brings job seekers, fortune hunters, and the promise of electricity to the area. Claire, a young mother of two, realizes her marriage is over when she wakes up with a sexually transmitted disease brought home by her husband.

Yael’s parents originally emigrated to Canada from South Africa years before and have returned while mourning the tragic death of Yael’s brother. Yael, also in mourning, but busy learning everything from medic training to driving on the left side of the road, uncovers a deadly elephant poaching ring. After witnessing some horrible violence, she just isn’t sure what to do about it.

A giant sinkhole begins swallowing an enormous swath of a marsh-like ecosystem that has been slated for development, along with parts of a highway and a large lake. The citizens of Opakulla, Florida struggle to understand what is happening as the land is sucked under. They’re also perplexed by un-erasable writing that appears on their new town hall. The sinkhole starts wreaking havoc with their lives and nobody knows what to do about it.

The Otis River flows through the once bustling city of Wattsville, a few hours north of NYC, reminding the remaining residents of better days.

At the end of a long, sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince.

Mosely Albright works in a Mission house helping drug addicts, alcoholics and those who are down on their luck. The reverend has asked him to search for one of the men who isn’t capable of surviving in the freezing cold.

Bruce Holsinger’s novel The Displacements is a gripping saga about what might happen in a world in which climate change can wreak havoc on life, even for those who have everything.

Immigration problems, climate issues, dysfunctional families, road barricades, and the division between haves and have nots play a role in this dream-like novel.

Gravity Hill (Madville Publishing 2022) is the story of a small town in Connecticut grappling with the tragic death of three teenage boys.