Theo Sterling is eleven when his grandfather kidnaps him, just for the afternoon. He learns that his father had shed his Jewish identity, married a very Catholic woman from Mexico, and stopped talking to either of his parents. < Back The Palace at the End of the Sea Simon Tolkien June 24, 2025 Theo Sterling is eleven when his grandfather kidnaps him, just for the afternoon. He learns that his father had shed his Jewish identity, married a very Catholic woman from Mexico, and stopped talking to either of his parents. At fourteen, Theo’s father makes him drop out of school to work in his clothing factory. Theo is disgusted at his father’s treatment of the workers and upset when he realizes that one of the men at his mother’s church has been inching into her affections. The 1929 crash leads to his father’s death, after which Theo and his mother barely survive until she marries her wealthy suitor. Now in England, Theo is enrolled in an upper-crust English boarding school. A friend inspires him to fight against Fascism and Theo nearly gets kicked out of school. After graduation, he spends the summer in Spain, where he’s again inspired, this time by a beautiful girl, to fight against the system. But it’s the 1930s and Fascism is simmering in Spain and Germany. Theo will have to make a serious decision about his future. Simon Tolkien is the author of No Man’s Land, Orders from Berlin, The King of Diamonds, The Inheritance, and Final Witness . He studied modern history at Trinity College, Oxford, and went on to become a London barrister specializing in criminal defense. Simon is the grandson of J.R.R. Tolkien and is a director of the Tolkien Estate. In 2022 he was named as series consultant to the Amazon TV series The Rings of Power . He has lived with his wife, vintage fashion author Tracy Tolkien, and their two children, Nicholas and Anna, in Santa Barbara for the past sixteen years. He loves the city with its wonderful Spanish architecture and unique position between the mountains and the sea. He is passionate about his garden which has taken almost as long to build, an enthusiasm he shares with his beloved pug, Sadie. He plays tennis twice a week and golf when he can and loves good TV drama - Silo was his favorite show last year. He is a devoted follower of Aston Villa Football Club, and tries to remain curious about the world, even when the news is upsetting. For more information, visit www.simontolkien.com Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

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. < Back The Kudzu Queen Mimi Herman January 24, 2023 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. Mattie Lee Watson is struck from the moment she sees Mr. Cullowee, and dreams of both becoming Cooper County Kudzu Queen and strolling on the Kudzu King’s arm. But Mattie’s best friend is faced with calamity, Mr. Cullowee seems to be as sneaky and destructive as kudzu, and Mattie realizes that she’s the only one who can fix the mess. Mimi Herman's The Kudzu Queen (Regal House, 2023) is a gripping coming-of-age story about family, trust, race relations, and friendship in the face of divisiveness, alcoholism, mean girls, prejudice, and evil. Mimi Herman is a Kennedy Center teaching artist and director of the United Arts Council Arts Integration Institute . She has taught in the Master of Education programs at Lesley University, served as the 2017 North Carolina Piedmont Laureate, and been an associate editor for Teaching Artist Journal. Since 1990, she has engaged over 25,000 students and teachers with her warm and intuitive teaching style. Mimi holds a BA from the University of North Carolina and an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson. She is the author of A Field Guide to Human Emotions, Logophilia and The Art of Learning . Her writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review , The Carolina Quarterly , Shenandoah , Crab Orchard Review , The Hollins Critic , Main Street Rag , Prime Number Magazine and other journals. Mimi has performed her fiction and poetry at many venues including Why There Are Words in Sausalito, Memorial Auditorium in Raleigh and Symphony Space in New York City. When she's not writing, Mimi codirects Writeaways writing workshops at a chateau in France, a villa in Italy, an adobe in New Mexico and a manor house in Ireland--and does her own plumbing and carpentry work on her almost hundred-year-old house. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

The Dependents (Back Bay Books, 2019) is a sensitive novel about love, parenthood, friendship, and finding contentment. < Back The Dependents Katharine Dion January 22, 2020 Gene is newly widowed and haunted by his memories. As he bumbles through long days, he questions his wife Maida’s sudden death, his daughter’s motives, and the enduring and meaningful friendship of best friends Ed and Gayle Donnelly. He tries to resurrect the good memories of the two couples raising children in a New Hampshire town and vacationing together every summer at a lake house owned by the Donnellys. He tried to come to terms about his relationship with his only daughter, Dary, who has chosen to raise a fatherless child, has made her home on the other side of the country, and who challenges Gene’s happy memories of everything that happened in their lives. She even challenges his view of her mother. Moving between Gene’s fraught current life and memories of his childhood, coming of age, courtship, marriage, and career, The Dependents (Back Bay Books, 2019) is a sensitive novel about love, parenthood, friendship, and finding contentment. Katharine Dion is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship. She is also a MacDowell Fellow and the recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. In her early twenties, Dion founded a nonprofit organization called Peer Health Exchange that (still) trains college students to teach a comprehensive health curriculum in public high schools. And she has spent two summers living in a Zen monastery working as a cook. Dion’s introduction to Buddhism came from living several summers at Tassajara, a monastery in the Ventana Wilderness; she is lay ordained in the Soto Zen lineage and helps people meet the grief of ecological destruction as a Buddhist Ecochaplain . She was born in Oakland and lives in Emeryville, California. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

A new father walks out of the hospital with his day-old baby while the mother recuperates from giving birth. He tells a series of lies and moves houses or countries whenever the truth gets too close. The young, broken-hearted mother devotes herself to searching for her missing daughter. < Back Tea by the Sea Donna Hemans June 30, 2020 A new father walks out of the hospital with his day-old baby while the mother recuperates from giving birth. He tells a series of lies and moves houses or countries whenever the truth gets too close. The young, broken-hearted mother devotes herself to searching for her missing daughter. Alternating between Jamaica and Brooklyn, NY, she is disappointed again and again, until seventeen years go by and she happens to see the photo of the man who took her baby. Now he is a priest. In beautiful, wrenching prose, Hemans' Tea by the Sea (Red Hen Press) tells an unforgettably moving story of family love, identity, and betrayal. Jamaican-born Donna Hemans is the author of the novels River Woman , winner of the 2003–4 Towson University Prize for Literature, and Tea by the Sea , for which she won the Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award for Adult Literature. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in the The Caribbean Writer, Crab Orchard Review, Witness, Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine , among others. She received her undergraduate degree from Fordham University and an MFA from American University. She lives in Greenbelt, Maryland. When she’s not writing, she plays tennis and runs the DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Olive Kersey is both penniless and alone at 37 – her brother and her boyfriend both died during WWII, her father not long after, and Olive spent all the years taking care of her ailing mother. < Back The Orphans of Mersea House Marty Wingate August 22, 2023 Olive Kersey is both penniless and alone at 37 – her brother and her boyfriend both died during WWII, her father not long after, and Olive spent all the years taking care of her ailing mother. Now her mother is dead and Olive has to vacate their rental. She lives in Southwold, a small town on the Suffolk coast of England and her choices are limited until her childhood friend Margery suddenly returns home. Margery has inherited a big old house, and hires Olive to run it, but the first two lodgers have secrets. Margery learns that she is the ward of an 11-year-old orphan, daughter of her first love. Olive adds little Juniper, whose legs were compromised by polio and requires braces, to her list of responsibilities in the old Mersea House. The officer in charge of placing children like Juniper begins keeping a close eye on the house, and in a small town, there are always those who want to expose secrets…… Marty Wingate began college life as a journalism major but ended up with an undergraduate degree in theater and a master’s degree in speech pathology from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. She worked as a speech therapist in Phoenix, at a school for the deaf in El Paso, and at the Central Remedial Clinic in Dublin, Ireland before settling in the Pacific Northwest where she met her husband and worked in public schools for many years. Her husband’s job as a newspaper and freelance copyeditor drew her back into the world of words by way of horticulture. She returned to school and obtained a second master’s degree, this one in urban horticulture from the University of Washington. She then wrote garden how-to books and magazine and newspaper articles and for several years could be heard taking gardening weekly on KUOW, the local NPR station. She segued from nonfiction to fiction writing with the appearance of her first mystery, The Garden Plot , in 2014. In the past nearly-ten years, Marty has written seventeen books. This includes eight books in the Potting Shed series featuring Pru Parke, a middle-aged American gardener transplanted from Texas to England; four Birds of a Feather mysteries that follow Julia Lanchester, bird lover, who runs a tourist office in a Suffolk village; three books in the First Edition Library series; and two historical fiction standalones including Glamour Girls , about a female, Second World War Spitfire pilot. More books are on the way. A Body on the Doorstep , the first book in The London Ladies Murder Club , set in 1921, will be out January 2024. Marty prefers on-the-ground research whenever possible, so she and her husband regularly travel to England and Scotland, where she can be found tracing the steps of her characters, stopping for tea and a slice of Victoria sponge in a café, or enjoying a swift half in a pub. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

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. < Back No More Empty Spaces D.J. Green April 9, 2024 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. He plans to tell the kids, once they’re across the world, that they won’t be going back to their alcoholic mother. The kids face the trials of learning the language, grappling with being so far away, and having a blended family. Will faces enormous problems at the building site in this lovely story centered on geology, engineering, science, landscape, and adventure. It’s about how a loving family can provide balance against the emotional and physical challenges of living on this fragile earth. D. J. Green is a writer, geologist, and sailor, as well as a bookseller and partner in Bookworks, an independent bookstore in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She lives near the Sandia Mountains in Placitas, New Mexico, and cruises the Salish Sea on her sailboat during the summers. An avid outdoorswoman, she loves to hike, backpack, birdwatch, and pick up and contemplate rocks (but never ever take any home from a National Park). D. J. revels in a great conversation about books with customers and colleagues at Bookworks, and is always looking for the next great read. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

In candid, witty, and often funny, razor-sharp dialogue, Feldman confronts the fall-out from excessive drinking, mental illness, childhood trauma, drugs, adultery, and nearly every other way a person can be wounded. < Back Start Without Me Joshua Max Feldman December 3, 2018 In Joshua Max Feldman 's thoughtful, bittersweet novel Start Without Me (William Morrow, 2017), two strangers meet at an airport restaurant, and through the course of one Thanksgiving Day, help each other grapple with love, disappointment, and family. In candid, witty, and often funny, razor-sharp dialogue, Feldman confronts the fall-out from excessive drinking, mental illness, childhood trauma, drugs, adultery, and nearly every other way a person can be wounded. His deeply-flawed characters are recognizable and honest as they strive to understand their mistakes while continuing to make them. Adam is a former musical prodigy who comes home for Thanksgiving for the first time since getting sober. Even though his family has seen him hit rock-bottom, he still feels like he’ll never be able to get anything right with them. Flight-attendant Marissa is in a marriage strained by tensions over race, class, and her husband’s lack of ambition. Now she finds out that she’s pregnant following a one-night-stand with her high school sweetheart. If Thanksgiving is the classic, all-American holiday, Start Without Me should be the classic, all-American tale about the struggle we face to become our best selves. Joshua Max Feldman is the author of two novels, The Book of Jonah (translated into nine languages) and Start Without Me . Joshua has written for The New York Times Book Review , among other publications, and is a former fellow of New York's Laboratory for Jewish Culture. He currently resides in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

In The Merciful (Haywire Books, 2021) by Jon Sealy nineteen-year-old Samantha James is killed while riding her bike home from work in a small coastal town one dark summer night in South Carolina. It’s a hit and run, and when they learn who did it, the townspeople want Daniel Hayward, the alleged driver, to pay for his crime. < Back The Merciful Jon Sealy February 2, 2021 In The Merciful (Haywire Books, 2021) by Jon Sealy nineteen-year-old Samantha James is killed while riding her bike home from work in a small coastal town one dark summer night in South Carolina. It’s a hit and run, and when they learn who did it, the townspeople want Daniel Hayward, the alleged driver, to pay for his crime. The headlines are compelling, but the truth is unclear. Everyone has an opinion - the media, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, Daniel, and Samantha’s family. Delving into each of the characters, the author pauses to reflect on culture, social pressures, family, and history. Ultimately, The Merciful is a morality play about one moment, one accident, one decision, and the way an instant can change the course of a life forever. Jon Sealy is the author of The Whiskey Baron , The Edge of America , and The Merciful , as well as the craft book So You Want to Be a Novelist . An upstate South Carolina native, he has a degree in English from the College of Charleston and an MFA in fiction writing from Purdue University. He currently lives with his family in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia, where he is the publisher of Haywire Books. When he's not writing or editing, you'll probably find him lifting weights in his garage, playing "swing monster" with his kids, or rafting on a river. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

When Jim Jones and his wife Marceline founded the Peoples Temple in the 1950s, they wanted to give hope to the poor and disenfranchised, to earn their bread from the earth, and to come together as sisters and brothers. They built a commune in the British Guyana jungle where some lived better than they’d lived in the states. Then Jim Jones became more autocratic, sired children with other followers, and ordered his doctor to drug dissenters. On November 18, 1978, 917 people were murdered or took their own lives at his direction. < Back Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown Annie Dawid November 14, 2023 Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown by Annie Dawid, (Inkspot Publishing 2023), opens long after 917 people died by drinking cyanide or by lethal injection on November 18, 1978. It’s 2008, and one of the survivors, who made it out earlier that day, is speaking to a reporter on the 30th anniversary of the “Jonestown Massacre.” When Jim Jones and his wife Marceline found Peoples Temple in the 1950s, they wanted to give hope to the poor and disenfranchised of all colors. They wanted to live honest lives earning their bread from the earth. They dreamt of their followers coming together as equals, loving each other as sisters and brothers, and building a commune in the British Guyana jungle. As the years passed, Jim Jones became more autocratic, he bedded his followers and sired children, and although Marceline hated what their marriage had become, she still loved him. Even unto death. Annie Dawid writes and teaches online in very rural Colorado, where she also makes rugs and assemblages as well as plays tennis and Scrabble. For the last 7 years, she’s taught in the master’s creative writing program for University College, University of Denver. She received her Ph.D. in 1989 from the University of Denver’s English Dept. in Creative Writing. For 15 years, she was professor of English and Creative Writing director at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR. Her last book, Put Off My Sackcloth: Essays, came out from The Humble Essayist Press in 2021. Her first book, York Ferry: A Novel , Cane Hill Press, 1993, second printing, was positively reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and the Los Angeles Times . It won the 2016 International Rubery Award in Fiction. Her second book was Lily in the Desert: Stories , Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2001, followed by And Darkness Was Under His Feet: Stories of a Family , Litchfield Review Press, 2009, winner of their inaugural short story collection prize. In 2017, Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, Anatomie of the World: Poems . Along the way, her 10-minute drama, Gun Play, won the New Rocky Mountain Voices Contest and was performed in Westcliffe, Colorado. But most of the last 19 years have been devoted to researching, writing, revising, and searching for a publisher for her Jonestown novel, rewarded, at last, by Inkspot Publishing of the UK and published on the 45th anniversary of the Jonestown massacre. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Their path is harrowing, but Lucy and Jeptha are characters to love, and readers will root for their success in a novel so riveting that no one will want to turn out the light until they know whether this family will survive. < Back Holding Onto Nothing Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne November 19, 2019 Lucy Kilgore has her bags packed for her escape from her rural Tennessee upbringing, but a drunken mistake forever tethers her to the town and one of its least-admired residents, Jeptha Taylor, who becomes the father of her child. Together, these two young people work to form a family, though neither has any idea how to accomplish that, and the odds are against them in a place with little to offer other than tobacco fields, a bluegrass bar, and a Walmart full of beer and firearms for the hunting season. Their path is harrowing, but Lucy and Jeptha are characters to love, and readers will root for their success in a novel so riveting that no one will want to turn out the light until they know whether this family will survive. Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne , the author of Holding Onto Nothing (Blair, 2019), grew up reading, writing, and shooting in East Tennessee. After graduating from Amherst College, she became a writer and a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly . Her nonfiction work has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Boston Globe , and Globalpost , among others. She worked on this novel in Grub Street’s year-long Novel Incubator course, under Michelle Hoover and Lisa Borders. Her essay on how killing a deer made her a feminist was published in Click! When We Knew We Were Feminists, edited by Courtney E. Martin and J. Courtney Sullivan. She lives outside Boston with her husband and four children. When she’s not kid-wrangling, Elizabeth enjoys doing CrossFit. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Simons Smythe was born into Charleston’s powerful elite and grew up in one of its fabled historic homes. Her grandfather and father have always been king makers, and all the women she knows have been taught from day one how to dress, how to speak, and how to conform. < Back In Polite Company Gervais Hagerty July 18, 2021 Today I talked to Gervais Hagerty about her novel In Polite Company (William Morrow, 2021). Simons Smythe was born into Charleston’s powerful elite and grew up in one of its fabled historic homes. Her grandfather and father have always been king makers, and all the women she knows have been taught from day one how to dress, how to speak, and how to conform. When Simons isn’t producing the news on a local TV station, she surfs the waves of Folly beach, crabs the salty rivers of Edisto Island, and joins an old friend at King Street bars. If she manages to accept the path laid out for her by generations, she’s also supposed marry her boyfriend, Trip. But she isn’t sure of anything. She confides her confusion only to her elegant grandmother, who urges her to be brave. Simons just has to figure out what that means. Author Gervais Hagerty grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. She earned her B.A. in psychology from Vanderbilt University. After a post-college stint in Southern California, she returned to the East Coast, where she worked as a news reporter and producer for both radio and television broadcasts. After earning her M.B.A. from The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, Hagerty was hired to teach Leadership Communications, and as director of the Patricia McArver Public Speaking Lab, she coached students, faculty, and staff to become effective speakers. She also advised the college's public speaking club. She is a board member of The Charleston Council for International Visitors and serves on Charleston's Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee. Gervais lives in Charleston with her husband and daughters, and when not writing, parenting, or trying to slow traffic so she can bike safely, she dabbles in creating single panel cartoons. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

The novel intertwines the lives of four people, each one of whom is grappling in some way with loss, fear, and betrayal. Esther, the main character, is in London to care for her dying mother and to escape from the breakdown of her marriage. < Back Underground Fugue Margot Singer September 6, 2018 Listening to NPR one day in the summer of 2005, author Margot Singer heard a report about a mute pianist who had washed up on the northern coast of England. That was also the summer of the London rush hour bombings that paralyzed the city and killed and maimed hundreds. Those news reports marinated over the years and finally led Margot to write her first novel, Underground Fugue (Melville House, 2017). The novel intertwines the lives of four people, each one of whom is grappling in some way with loss, fear, and betrayal. Esther, the main character, is in London to care for her dying mother and to escape from the breakdown of her marriage. Esther’s mother, Lonia, tosses in bed remembering her escape from Nazi Germany, and her beloved brother’s failure to make it out alive. Esther’s neighbor, Javad, is the Persian doctor who is consulted about a mute piano player who washed up on the beach in the north of England. He is also the long-divorced father of nineteen-year-old Amir, who comes and goes at odd hours, and seems to be involved in something secretive. The story weaves the lives and thoughts of these four characters before and after the shocking 7/7 terror attack in London’s underground. Underground Fugue won the 2017 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for American Jewish fiction. Singer’s 2007 story collection, The Pale of Settlement , won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Margot Singer’s work has been featured on NPR and in many publications such as theKenyon Review, the Gettysburg Review , Agni , and Conjunctions . She is a professor of English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next