Saving Ruby King is a powerful story about family, the pull of history, the power of friendship, and church culture in the Black community on Chicago’s South Side. Ruby King and her mother, Alice, have been beaten by their alcoholic father and husband for years. When Alice is found murdered in her home, her homegoing…
Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians opens on the anxiety-inducing scene of Ricky Boss Ribs running for his life. He’s being tracked and hunted… But is it by the horde of angry men from outside the bar or does it have something to do with the mysterious herd of elk waiting in the field…
More than four hundred years after his death, William Shakespeare is still as relevant today as is Lin-Manuel Miranda. Yet, we still don’t know much about his personal and family life except that at age 18 he married 26 year old Anne (AKA Agnes) Hathaway and that their first daughter Susannah was born six months…
Why haven’t more people heard of Nancy Wake? An upper-class expat who smuggled documents and people out of WWII Paris, armed the French Resistance, and killed a Nazi commander bare-handed, this war heroine should be a household name — but she isn’t. Author Ariel Lawhon sets out to rectify the oversight in her latest novel,…
Sometimes I hear people remark that they wish they were living in a simpler, kinder time, like the 1950s. Connie Schultz’s debut novel, The Daughters of Erietown, reminds readers that those days weren’t always so happy and innocent. This family saga centers on the McGinty family and how their lives evolve while living in Erietown,…
