Showing 1–16 of 22 results
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A Song in My Heart
A Song in My Heart, book one of a trilogy, follows Alejandra Stanford, born into a privileged bicultural family in early-1900s Minneapolis. Immersed in American, Hispanic, and European influences amid turbulent national events, she discovers music as her calling. A gifted pianist and budding composer, she dreams of becoming a conductor. Chasing that ambition through the great cities of the U.S. and Europe, she encounters legendary music, formidable obstacles, and two intellectually matched suitors—each offering a different future—until love and passion shape her destiny.
flows softly and rhythmically
—Ana Luisa Fajer Flores, Consul General of Mexico, St. Paul, MN -
Accidental Journey
Richard Lentz has written a novel abounding with life’s complications. At once a probing family saga and the story of a man’s recovery from a traumatic brain injury, Accidental Journey is the richest sort of book. It immerses you in the injury, then pulls you out on the other side. You’ll feel as if you’ve gone through the recovery yourself, and, standing at the crossroads you find on the light end of the tunnel, you’ll be as resolute as these finely drawn characters. You’ll also be wiser. And fuller of heart.
a book that is well-paced—painfully slow and paradoxically urgent
—Hal Steiger, PhD -
Black Dirt, Bright Stars
In Black Dirt, Bright Stars, Will Weaver continues the Haugen saga into the rugged Midwest of the 1940s. After loss, injustice, and the ruin of their farm, four siblings fight to survive. Jenny, the youngest, finds hard-won power at the county courthouse and becomes a leader no one can dismiss. But when revenge goes wrong, she binds the family to a vow of silence. As the Haugens rise to prosperity, their buried secret threatens everything.
A marvelous work of art… deserves to be read and celebrated.
—Larry Watson, Montana 1948 -
Circus Rex: A Novel
Doctor Buzz signs on as ringmaster of the one-ring Rex Terrestrial, Celestial & Nautical Circus—then steers a ragtag troupe from the Mississippi headwaters to New Orleans. Along the way: alcoholic camels, broken boats, chaotic cooks, and his own crisis of confidence—plus a shot at love if he chooses wisely. Loosely based on the author’s life, this comic novel blends poetic imagery, carny patter, and offbeat humor.
Enjoy the hell out of Loren’s brilliance as a storyteller.
—Hank Roubicek, Professor, Radio Personality, Storyteller and Author -
Day Bring Back the Night
In Day Brings Back the Night, three episodes in a family’s life unfold across decades, each shaped by memory, longing, and the mysteries of love. In 1989, Helen stands at the threshold of a new beginning yet cannot shake the trauma of an oppressively painful past. Years later, Tom and Amanda journey north into Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, where silence, grief, and tenderness open old emotional terrain—and where the wilderness begins to reveal what the family cannot. By 2023, the family returns to the wilderness, drawn together by what has endured and what remains unresolved. Told in three intimate movements, this lyrical and psychologically rich novel explores the afterlife of pain, the bonds between parents and children, and the difficult grace of forgiveness without forgetting.
Duren has composed this novel as a song, a melody that carries from generation to generation the voices, visions, and scars a family has grown up with and will never leave behind.
—Cass Dalglish, novelist, Ring of Lions, and poet, Humming the Blues / Cantando los Blues (a boca cerrada) -
Dorie Lavalle
Born on January 1, 1900, Dorie is trapped in poverty—childless, lovelessly married to Louie LaValle, and tied to a failing farm. Prohibition pushes her to make and sell moonshine, and she soon earns more than she imagined. With free-wheeling Victor building a hidden woodland still, danger escalates when he returns wounded from an ambush. Now Dorie must protect her future—and Victor—from neighbors, a zealous sheriff, and the Chicago mob.
In luminous prose and with a powerful sense of drama, Mary Desjarlais brings us a new kind of hero…
—Janis Agee, author of The River Wife -
Emerging Man
Near forty, Ryan Connelly returns to his small Minnesota hometown hoping to reconnect with his estranged father. Stuck in grief and inertia, he befriends an aging sculptor carving a giant boulder into a man rising from the earth. Helping with the work, Ryan begins to heal, confront his past, and rediscover his passion for living.
A coming-of-age novel blending humor and heartbreaking pathos, <em>Emerging Man</em> teaches us that it’s never too late to become a man.
—Ian Graham Leask, author of House of Large Sizes -
Green Goes Forth
Green Goes Forth, prequel to Robert Gilbert’s Mintwood Place, follows Joe Green’s 1970s coming-of-age. A senior at American University, he lands in trouble and flees Washington two steps ahead of the law. Hiding in Sonoma County, he studies The Odyssey and the I Ching, grows marijuana, and returns after two years—wealthy, gnostic, and opposed to rising Reagan-era politics back home.
whets the appetite to keep going
—Monte Dutton -
Hand Me Down My Walking Cane
During the Great Depression, Faunce Ridge on the Minnesota–Canadian border is condemned as a New Deal “rural slum.” Emil Rousseau returns to photograph neighbors’ hardship to justify resettlement—but they refuse to leave. Narrated through Emil, his sweetheart Rose, madam Sadie, and bootlegger Magnus, this novel evokes the borderland’s harsh beauty, history, and mystical hold.
Her characters are fully realized; her descriptions of the landscape make you long for ‘up north’ and her dialogue is spot-on.
—Mary Ann Grossman, Pioneer Press -
House of Fossils
In House of Fossils, Marilene Phipps follows Unseen Worlds with a poetic, genre-bending fictional memoir. Narrated by Io—an alter-soul seeking beauty and timelessness—this immigrant story confronts how race, skin color, culture, and others’ reactions can imprison identity. Moving between Haiti and the wider world, it explores Haiti’s color-and-class hierarchies, Christianity–Vodou spirituality, and turbulent politics alongside an America undergoing multicultural transformation. Phipps crafts vivid characters and high emotional intensity in a quest to live beyond inherited ‘fossils.’
haunting lyricism
—KIRKUS REVIEWS -
House of Large Sizes
House of Large Sizes is a sharply original, genre-bending novel about a dysfunctional, sexually compulsive family pushed to the brink when one member flees to New Orleans for an unsanctioned sex change. Drawn into the French Quarter’s “sump of America,” they face a mythic jambalaya of horrors as a venomous, self-proclaimed witch threatens to run amok. Shocking, readable, unforgettable.
Rendered with delicious irony, mingled with kinky sex, Haitian magic, and suspense
—Bob Van Laerhoven, author of Baudelaire’s Revenge -
Mothers Hurling Bricks
After his first novel, Crude, Bill Nemmers turns to a different absurdity: the US Army’s Cold War occupation of West Germany. In Heidelberg, an expatriate Czech rock band—the Mothers Hurling Bricks—memorializes the Prague women who flung paving stones at Soviet tanks during the 1968 invasion. Narrated by a US soldier who knew the musicians, the novel becomes a darkly comic, humane tribute to mothers—including his own—driven to defy mechanized war.
a fascinating story of military intrigue and humanitarian daring
—Marge on Amazon -
Moving in Stereo
Wimbledon 1996: tennis journeyman Richard Blanco rides a late-career surge into the quarterfinals—and a million-dollar endorsement—while secretly hearing voices again. His dead punk-rock friend Luke Scream returns to taunt his scarred psyche, and Blanco’s “mature” tennis collides with reckless choices, tangled affairs, and escalating absurdity across London, L.A., and New York. Back at his Florida academy, a charismatic rookie threatens to steal his mojo—and unravel him entirely.
A compellingly dysfunctional tennis-playing protagonist
—KIRKUS REVIEWS -
Muskeg
In 1922 Savannah, Hazel and Theda’s love is shattered by a speakeasy raid. Forced apart, Hazel flees to a remote Lake of the Woods island. By 1937 she is running a fishing resort when Theda arrives with her twelve-year-old son—hunted by an enraged husband and detectives—forcing Hazel into a perilous, life-changing choice.
A story of forbidden love that resonates even a hundred years later.
—Sarah Stonich, author of Laurentian Divide -
Power & Light
In 1906, a Norwegian emigrant family arrives in North Dakota dreaming of land and a better life. Tragedy—and a powerful man’s crime—threatens to destroy them. Seventeen-year-old Jenny Haugen becomes an unlikely hero, leading her siblings on a generational march toward agency, justice, and power. Power & Light, first in a two-book saga, echoes America’s hard-won ascent and Weaver’s signature themes.
A consuming work of profound poetical depth and moral power.
—KIRKUS REVIEWS -
Rolling Pigeons
A successful businessman, devout husband and father, and most importantly, the town of Gilmore’s legendary star pitcher, Sy Todd, is a 63-year-old pillar of this colorful rural midwestern community and is respected and liked by all. Two weeks before being inducted into the County Baseball Hall of Fame, he inexplicably begins to falter. Is it a nascent streak of lechery brought on by a troubled marriage, a fear of aging into a life unfulfilled? Or is it something deeper that the usually steadfast Sy, for once in his life, cannot control. Rolling Pigeons is named after a colorful breed of pigeon selected for its inclination to inexplicably tumble or roll in the air. As a hobby, Sy is raising a coop full of these oddball birds, which become a strong metaphor for his own incomprehensible actions.
