Bonnie Campbell is a writer living in an unfinished house in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with her husband Christopher and other animals. She is six- feet tall and she drives a 1985 Chevy pick-up truck with a rebuilt 350 small-block engine.
The Snowbirds (2025) Christina Clancy "I loved spending time in Clancy's Palm Springs, where the local color features a passel of voluble eccentrics as magnificent as the mountain views, and a twisty, harrowing hike of a plot. This life-affirming novel of being lost and found will shake you up."
The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter (2025) (Judith Shakespeare, book 2) Grace Tiffany "Judith Shakespeare is all grown up - heck, she's as old as me! - and has the battle scars to prove it. How this mother, wife, grandmother, midwife, apothecary, and all-around wise woman navigates a time shockingly similar to our own gun-toting one is nothing short of amazing. You will love Grace Tiffany's lively and enlightening story."
Honey (2024) Victor Lodato "'Every woman is free to invent her own apocalypse,' says Honey Fasinga, the stylish heroine of Victor Lodato's new novel. Honey knows where the bodies are buried - she helped bury some of them - and at eighty-two she is still figuring out how to defend herself and those she loves against the dangerous bullies of this world. This novel is a wonder of strange kindnesses, unthinkable cruelties, and familial fracture. A sharply funny, searingly wise story about the way that a life lived on its own terms is the ultimate art form. Irrepressible and romantic, empathetic but refreshingly unsentimental, and ultimately unforgettable - like its heroine, Honey is a true original."
You Shall See the Beautiful Things (2023) Steve Amick "Love this this sweet, clever, and gritty retelling of the 'Dutch Lullaby,' the one about the army deserter opium addict, the lovesick balladeer with a voice like 'an ill-fitting oarlock,' and the radish-eating narcoleptic - in a boat. Yet it's no joke: Amick's language is inspired, as transcendent as the inaugural fishing trip in the small craft these unlikely friends build at the edge of the North Sea. Every page is filled with marvelous revelations about the nature of the world and about being human. Amick's vivid landscape of the 1880s herring-centered world even includes glimpses of Vincent 'Cent' Van Gogh. Here, despite the weight of colonialism, war, and financial and family struggles, folks with open hearts can still find magic and goodness, can still live lives 'mostly full of awe.' You Shall See the Beautiful Things is a promise delivered."
Tin Camp Road (2021) Ellen Airgood "The characters in Tin Camp Road are so vulnerable it hurts. So much is at stake for Laurel, a young single mother struggling to make ends meet, that this novel reads with the emotional momentum of a thriller. Caring for her precocious daughter is further complicated when the path out of poverty presents new and terrible compromises. This achingly beautiful novel considers the pursuit of happiness in all its complexity."
Life Among the Terranauts (2021) Caitlin Horrocks "These stories--inventive, outrageous, exquisite--are my kind of fun. How are we supposed to live in this world? Life Among the Terranauts will help show us the way. I'm in love with the brilliant stories in this book."
The Wildlands (2018) Abby Geni "Every scene of this cleverly plotted novel is drawn with complex prose, rich detail, and an authorial voice that wisely observes the human animal. Abby Geni is my new favorite writer."
The Weight of Him (2017) Ethel Rohan "How can a story about death be so life affirming? Ethel Rohan's compassionate debut novel is sad, heartbreaking even, but also uplifting, a celebration of the determination to keep on trying."
