Henry Carter Hull

Compulsively readable and stylistically stunning, Black Dog Summer begins with a murder, a farmstead massacre, in the South African bush. Thirty-eight-year-old Sally is but one of the victims. Her life brutally cut short, she narrates from her vantage point in the afterlife and watches as her sister, Adele, her brother-in-law and unrequited love Liam, her niece Bryony, and her teenage daughter, Gigi, begin to make sense of the tragedy. A suspenseful...

In Auburn, Pennsylvania, a farming community overrun with crows, high school senior Leighton struggles to keep herself and her sisters safe from their abusive father even as she starts a relationship.

Finley McGowan is determined that the niece she's raising will always feel loved and wanted. Unlike how she felt after her mom left to pursue a dream of stardom, and when the grandfather who was left to raise them abandoned her and her sister, Sloane, when they needed him most.

It is the early 1980s and fifteen-year-old Libby is obsessed with trees. One night, while driving home, her mother, exhausted and overwhelmed with the fighting in the backseat, pulls over and orders Libby's little sister Ellen to walk home. What none of this family knows as they drive off leaving a twelve-year-old girl on the side of the road five miles from home with darkness closing in, is what will happen next.

Mona--almost 24, cleaning houses to get by, emotionally adrift. Handing out clean needles to drug addicts, she falls for a recipient who proceeds to break her heart in unimaginable ways. Always just under the surface are her memories of growing up in a chaotic, destructive family from which she's trying to disentangle herself.

"Cousins, widely regarded as Venturini's masterpiece, is the story of four women from an impoverished, dysfunctional family in La Plata, Argentina, who are forced to suffer through a series of ordeals, including illegal abortions, miscarriages, sexual abuse, disfigurement, and murder, narrated by a daughter whose success as a painter offers her a chance to achieve economic independence and help her family as best as she can." -- Amazon.

Some of the stormy weather of the past few seasons seems to have finally lifted for the Quinns. Kevin is about to tie the knot with Isabelle, and there's hopeful news about Bart, who has been captured by enemy forces in Afghanistan. That doesn't mean there aren't a few dark clouds on the horizon as the family juggle health scares and love triangles. But if there's one holiday that brings the Quinn family together, it's Christmas. And this year promises...

"Every week Tracy Beaumont writes letters to Innocence X asking the organization to help her father, an innocent Black man on death row. After seven years, Tracy is running out of time: her dad has only 267 days left. Then the police arrive in the night, and Tracy's older brother, Jamal, goes from being a bright, promising track star to a thug on the run, accused of killing a white girl. As Tracy investigates what really happened between Jamal and...

"When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition ... Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is [their center of gravity] Jude, ... by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body...