The Beauty and the Hell of It and Other Stories (Guernica, 2025) conjures up images of women who struggle through difficult transitions, unpleasant encounters, or ghastly boyfriends and husbands.

Rose Janowitz is surprised to get a production job with a radio soap opera and stunned to fall in love with the show’s African American leading man.

Lacy Fewer inherited sacks of letters from a great aunt who emigrated from Ireland to America in 1908 and turned the letters into a novel.

Port Anna tells the story of a quiet town on the Maine coast that has attracted the attention of wealthy investors seeking a picturesque, windswept summer cottage overlooking the ocean.

Debra Spark’s latest novel was inspired by the life of Walt Kuhn, who introduced Americans to modern art, and also by an infamous east coast boarding school that was forcibly shut down in 2014. The novel twists and turns through the lives of an artist and his wife, a teenager forced to attend a horrifying boarding school, the artist and his wife’s lonely daughter after their deaths, and a divorced art appraiser studying the works of the dead artist.

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.

Hailey Gelman just learned that her soon-to-be ex-husband was murdered in his home.

Set in 1898, Harriet Morrow is 21, supports her 16-year-old brother, and has been accepted as the first female detective at the Prescott Agency.

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

Sparks fly in Megan Staffel’s novel, The Causative Factor (Regal House 2024), when Rachel is randomly paired with Rubiat, a fellow student, for an assignment in their college art class.

Hermine “Herself” Zook is a healer who rules over an island in a swampy area of Michigan known as “The Waters.” People, including her three grown daughters, fear her, but her powerful herbal and plant-based medicines have cured the townspeople for decades of viruses, pains, and unwanted pregnancies.

Today I talked to Esinam Bediako about here novel Blood on the Brain (Red Hen Press, 2024).

In 1979 during her freshman year at Denver East High School in 1979, Suzanne’s mother was murdered by an armed robber while working in her record store.

In Sara Johnson Allen's novel Down Here We Come Up (Black Lawrence Press 2023), Kate Jessup’s mother lures her back home to North Carolina.