Check out these exciting new indie books for the fall and upcoming winter season!
THE CHILDREN OF THIS MADNESS By Gemini Waahaj
This story is told through two different points of view – that of Beena Nasir Uddin and her father. In Bangladesh, a bombing takes Beena’s mother and sibling from her, leaving her and her father to swivel in the brutal aftermath. Sometime later, she meets and marries someone, only to avoid another well-to-do businessman of the same background who’s company, ironically enough, specializes in war-time profiteering.
Beena’s journey is balancing the grief she feels, her life as a new wife and looking after her aging father, while trying to find herself in the midst of it all. THE CHILDREN OF MADNESS weaves a bittersweet tale of resilience, doubt, choices, hope and the immigrant experience during the height of Anti-Muslim xenophobia in the United States.
DEARBORN By Ghassan Zeineddine
From Dearborn, Michigan comes a beautiful collection of sad and humorous short stories spanning over various decades and highlighting the Lebanese-American diaspora residing there. Zeineddine’s debut covers themes such as generational trauma, a sense of belonging and inner-identity. These stories are written for the Arab-American audience but anyone can and will enjoy these tales as well as they demonstrate to us who we are as human beings.
SLEEP TIGHT SATELLITE By Carol Guess
If you enjoy tropes that incorporate queer found family meshed with post-Covid semblance, SLEEP TIGHT SATELLITE is the book to read. Told through a collection of short stories stemming from the Pacific Northwest, Carol Guess introduces readers to an alternative universe of characters working together, perusing through the complexities of their own lives and the changes that plague them – no pun intended.
YESTERYEAR By Stephen G. Eoannou
YESTERYEAR is a loosely-based tale about real-life Fran Striker, the creator of the LONE RANGER series. In the thick of the Great Depression era, Buffalo resident and struggling playwright Francis Striker is in the middle of coming up with a pilot for a new radio program but is afflicted with an incessant writers block that doesn’t seem to cease due to a string of unfortunate events after leaving a speakeasy one night. With gangs, forbidden jewelry, curses and more taking over the plot, Eoannou’s novel is the perfect read to cozy up with on a cold day, and surely will not disappoint.
TANDEM By Andy Mozina
Andy Mozina has done something many authors wouldn’t dare to do at the risk of upheaval from the audience – make the protagonist of TANDEM an exceedingly unlikeable person. Enter Mike Kovacs, an economics professor who, one night while on the road, gets too inebriated and ends up killing two people on impact.
Doing what anyone would do when trying to avoid jail time for such a crime, he does his best to cover up the scene and refuses to turn himself into the authorities. Instead, realizing that one of the people he killed is his neighbor’s daughter, he attempts to conivingly befriend her as she struggles with her own issues.
DELIVER ME By Elle Nash
If you enjoy any form of body horror in literature, or if you’re simply not a squeamish person, Elle Nash’s novel is for you. Taking place in the Missouri Ozark region, Daisy – or Dee Dee – works a grueling day-job at a chicken processing facility and lives with her partner, an ex-con insect breeder.
After an unfortunate string of miscarriages, she finally gets pregnant and the fetus seems to be healthy enough to carry to term – a miracle that surely satisfies her partner and especially her overly-controlling Pentecostal mother.
When Dee Dee’s longtime friend Sloane comes back into the picture, it forces her to rethink everything. DELIVER ME accurately displays the grotesqueness of the human body and the decisions of one woman that change her life, and those around her, forever.
NDIMA NDIMA By Tsitsi Mapepa
In 1990’s Zimbabwe, during a time of political unrest and violence, four sisters seek their own ways of surviving and living in such trying times. The story is mainly told through the eyes of the youngest sister, Nyeredzi Taha, who shares a special bond with their mother, Zuva.
Though not her fault, Zuva carries a more complex relationship with the rest of her daughters as she left them twenty years prior to fight and assist in the throes of a civil war. Mapepa’s NDIMA NDIMA is a deeply-woven and emotional coming-of-age tale about owning your power and strength as a young woman, in the midst of utter surrounding chaos.