Lemai never forgets the humiliation of her teachers and the burning of books during the Cultural Revolution.

The pain of 73-year-old Aurora’s divorce over thirty years before continues to reverberate – she’s eccentric, filled with schemes, and only able to function with help from her daughter.

Based on the true story of a 16th century heiress who is left to die on a deserted island off the coast of what was then called New France (now Canada).

The Anatomy of Exile by Zeeva Bukai (Delphinium Books 2025) opens in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, when Tamar Abadi’s sister-in-law is killed by what looks like a terrorist attack but turns out to be the tragic end of Hadas’s love affair with a Palestinian poet.

Sisters Nadia and Cass are heirs to a company that builds yachts for the super wealthy, and both are excited about a commission that will introduce them to the huge Asian market.

Today I talked to Chikodili Emelumadu about Dazzling (Harry N. Abrams, 2023).

After losing their young son in a tragic accident, Astrid, a Norwegian botanist specializing in Arctic flora, decides to join her husband, Tor, at a remote whaling station in the Arctic, where he spends every whaling season hunting belugas. In heartfelt journal entries, Astrid describes being stranded in a whaling hut through the dark season of 1937-38.

A beautiful dual-timeline novel about the Yemenite community struggling in overcrowded immigrant camps in 1950’s Israel, family bonds, mother-daughter relationships, political realities in 1995 Israel, and a young woman learning to be honest with herself.

Mustafa was born with a twisted neck and treated with disdain throughout his life. He works long hours as a janitor on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Isaac is a religiously observant new immigrant from New York who stumbles into a position as assistant to a famous rabbi known for curing the uncurable.

At the end of the 16th century, the powerful Medici family demanded that before marrying into the family, Vincenzo I Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, had to show his prowess by deflowering a virgin. This is her story.

Set around the globe in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, Leegant’s characters face loneliness, illness, difficult relationships, horrible memories, unfaithful husbands, and uncaring or dying parents. These are moving stories about recognizable people, all facing displacement in one way or another, trying to live their lives.

In 2007 Ukraine, following the death of her husband, Yefim Shulman, Nina finds a letter he wrote to the KGB confessing the secret he’d kept for over 50 years. If it came out that his unit was wiped out and he was taken as a prisoner of Germany during WWII, he would have been considered a traitor to the USSR.

No More Empty Spaces (She Writes Press, 2024) opens with Will Ross, an engineering geologist, who shares custody of his three children with his ex-wife, taking his 1953 Cessna up for a spin. It’s 1973, and he’s decided to take his children to a remote area of Turkey where he’s been hired to analyze the site of a damn.

INSIDE THE MIRROR centers on twin sisters growing up in 1950s Bombay, who aspire to become artists. The family is still recovering from the Partition of India in 1947, especially the twins’ grandmother, who once fought for justice against the British regime.

Nadia is a young Bosnian refugee who has lost everyone she’s loved. In 1997 she gets into England on a fake passport and finds temp work in a shady office that might be doing something illegal. A new temp shows up and Nadia knows he’s from her country even though he says he’s Armenian. She can tell that he’s Serbian, perhaps the kind that hunted down Bosnians like her. Nadia sees danger everywhere.