April 18 2025
New Fiction
The River Knows Your Name by Kelly Mustian - For nearly thirty years, Nell has kept a childhood promise to never reveal what she and Evie found tucked inside a copy of Jane Eyre in their mother’s bookcase – a record of Evie’s birth naming a stranger as her mother. But lately, Nell has been haunted by hazy memories of their early life in Mississippi, years their reclusive mother, Hazel, has kept shrouded in secrecy. Evie recalls nothing before their house on Clay Mountain in North Carolina, but Nell remembers abrupt moves, odd accommodations, and the rainy night a man in a dark coast and a hat pulled low climbed their porch steps with a very little girl – Evie – then left without her. In dual storylines, Nell, forty-two in 1971, reaches into the past to uncover dangerous, long-buried secrets, and Becca, a young mother in the early 1930s, presses ahead, each moving toward 1934, the catastrophic year that would forever link them.
The Sirens by Emilia Hart – 2019: Lucy awakens in the middle of the night with her hands around her ex-lover’s throat. Horrified, she flees to her older sister's house on the Australian coast, hoping Jess can help explain the vivid dreams that preceded the attack – but she is nowhere to be found. Desperate for answers, Lucy finds and beings to read her sister’s adolescent diary. 1999: Jess is a lonely sixteen-year-old in a rural town in the middle of the continent. Diagnosed with a rare allergy to water, she has always felt different, until her young, charming art teacher takes an interest in her drawings, seeing a power and maturity in them – and in her – that no one else has. 1800: Twin sisters Mary and Eliza are torn from their home in Ireland and forced onto a convict ship bound for Australia. Since their mother’s drowning when they were girls, they’ve feared the ocean – but as the boat bears them farther and farther from all they know, they feel the water calling to them. As Lucy awaits Jess’s return, strange rumors surrounding her sister’s small town start to emerge. Numerous men have disappeared at sea. A tiny baby was found hidden in a cave. And Sailors tell of hearing women’s voices on the waves.
The Page Turner by Viola Shipman – Emma Page grew up the black sheep in a bookish household, raised to believe that fine literature is the only worthy type of fiction. Her parents, self-proclaimed “serious” authors who run their own vanity press, The Mighty Pages, mingle in highbrow social circles that look down on anything too popular or mainstream, while her sister, Jess, is a powerful social media influencer whose stylish reviews can make or break a novel. Hiding her own work in progress from her disapproving parents, Emma finds inspiration at the family cottage: the juicy summer romances that belonged to her late grandmother. But a chance discovery unearthed from her GiGi’s belongings reveals a secret that has the power to ruin her parents’ business and their reputation in the industry – a secret that has already fallen into the hands of an unscrupulous publishing insider with a grudge to settle. Now Emma must decide – as much as she’s dreamed of the day when her parents are forced to confront their own egos, can she just sit back and watch The Mighty Pages be exposed and their legacy destroyed?