It's 2004, the summer of Glacier Park's grizzly bear DNA study. In the Cut Bank Valley, Clancy Dyer dashes through the aspen to roust her coworker Ezra, but instead she finds his shredded tent and a horrible smell. Ezra has disappeared.

Meanwhile, District Ranger Mack Savage speeds toward the valley's car campground in response to his rookie ranger's report of unusual bear behavior. Mack has been dating Liz Ralston, the biologist conducting a groundbreaking DNA study. Saboteurs have wrenched her materials and she suspects both park personnel and a local climber. Frustrated with Mack's inability to protect her study, Liz has hired a Blackfeet tribal member and local packer who she knows carries a pistol and a grudge. Meanwhile, she may not be above taking her own revenge.

Set amidst Glacier's fierce beauty, Baited grapples with grief, multiple suspicious deaths, differing beliefs surrounding the protection of Glacier's grizzly bears, the park's fraught relationship with the adjacent Blackfeet Reservation, and especially how to reconcile one's love and affection for a person who has committed a reprehensible act.

Told primarily from Clancy and Mack's points of view but with some of the other characters taking center stage as needed, in particular the Native American stories that help shape the novel. The writing abounds with beautifully rendered passages and vivid thumbnail descriptions that make Glacier Park's majestic wilderness a character in itself.

Against the wilds of sea and wood, a young immigrant woman settles into life outside Duluth in the 1890s, still shocked at finding herself alone in a new country, abandoned and adrift; in the early 1920s, her orphan son, now grown, falls in love with the one woman he shouldn't and uses his best skills to build them their own small ark to escape. But their pasts travel with them, threatening to capsize even their fragile hope. In this triumphant new novel, Peter Geye has crafted another deeply moving tale of a misbegotten family shaped by the rough landscape in which they live--often at the mercy of wildlife and weather--and by the rough edges of their own breaking hearts.

Set against the powerful lakeshore landscape of northern Minnesota, Safe from the Sea is a heartfelt novel in which a son returns home to reconnect with his estranged and dying father thirty-five years after the tragic wreck of a Great Lakes ore boat that the father only partially survived and that has divided them emotionally ever since. When his father for the first time finally tells the story of the horrific disaster he has carried with him so long, it leads the two men to reconsider each other.

Meanwhile, Noah's own struggle to make a life with an absent father has found its real reward in his relationship with his sagacious wife, Natalie, whose complications with infertility issues have marked her husband's life in ways he only fully realizes as the reconciliation with his father takes shape.

Peter Geye has delivered an archetypal story of a father and son, of the tug and pull of family bonds, of Norwegian immigrant culture, of dramatic shipwrecks and the business and adventure of Great Lakes shipping in a setting that simply casts a spell over the characters as well as the reader.

Tom Johnson has turned 85 and has suffered a few events, though he knows his mind is sharp. His oldest son, who had Down Syndrome has died, and his remaining two children want to move him out of the homestead lake house and into a retirement home in town. What Tom wants to do is to find the only woman he ever loved, a woman he met in the Netherlands where he was stationed during World War II.

And so he slips away, deftly covers his tracks, and begins his search for her in Eindhoven. While his children try to track him down and then have him extradited back home, Tom delves into love and loss and the value of memory. Soon he catches sight of a woman he believes to be Sarah, the love he lost almost a lifetime ago.

He will have to fight for her affections and forgiveness, even as he fights for the legal right to stay in the Netherlands in the name of love and family and all the remaining rights of an old man.

Mewshaw's sentences sing. His ability to evoke a setting that many will find exotic rivals Graham Greene's, as does the depth of his characterization and his ability to make the reader keep wondering what in the world might happen next. The narrative keeps delivering surprises all the way to the final line. I love this novel. -- Steve Yarbrough, author Stay Gone Days

The son of a Spanish mother and an American father who claimed to have worked for the CIA, Paul Stewart lives in his family home, a carmen in the Albaicín district of Granada. The house, which surrounds a lush courtyard, has foundations that date from Spain's Islamic era and has been in the family for generations.

Struggling to make ends meet, Paul has turned the carmen into an artist's residency that caters primarily to American artists. The only current guests are Simone, a celebrity painter with a sexualized reputation, and an asylum-seeking Algerian professor who is the subject of a fatwa. Paul has been forced to take him in. An African refugee named Blessed, who's been displaced by the arrival of the professor, suffers a crisis of both body and faith as a result.

The relationship between Simone and Paul begins to complicate matters, and suspicions about everybody abound. Murky pasts and private agendas collide with avowed intentions--including those of the U.S. government--as events gather momentum toward an explosive, revelatory finish. In the hands of Michael Mewshaw, a master storyteller, this story fairly shines in our fraught age of political secrets and international terrorism.

Madewell Brown walked into the village on a hot, dry day in 1946. A solitary black man with one arm longer than the other, he had never found a place for himself. Never, that is, until he had painted his own history on the interior walls of his adobe house in Guadalupe.

Fifty years later, Will Sawyer's truck runs out of gas, and as he walks that same long road back into town he knows it's best to keep his eyes on the ground. But he doesn't understand the town's long history of displacement or the difficulty of truly fitting in there, until he hears the story of the dead girl found hanging from Las Manos Bridge.

In Perdido, Rick Collignon returns to the same magical village he first introduced in The Journal of Antonio Montoya.

In Perdido, Collignon returns to the same magical town he first introduced in The Journal of Antonio Montoya. Once again mixing present and past, living and dead, he delivers a forthright and unflinching examination of race, belonging, and identity. With this novel, Collignon shows that a powerful new voice in American fiction has arrived.

This fall, the film festival circuit will be introduced to the indomitable Luli McMullen in Hick, the new film made from the acclaimed novel by Andrea Portes, who also adapted the screenplay. The film--directed by Derick Martini--stars Chloë Grace Moretz, Blake Lively and Eddie Redmayne and features Rory Culkin, Anson Mount, Juliette Lewis and Alec Baldwin in supporting roles.

Hick is the story of Luli (Moretz), a bright kid from a hick town who's had enough and strikes out on her own with some borrowed cash, a .45 and her wits. On the road, Luli is taken under the wing of a glamorous young grifter named Glenda (Lively), who has experienced worlds barely imaginable to Luli. As the two make their way across the American landscape, they encounter a captivating and dangerous young man named Eddie Kreezer (Redmayne), a disturbing criminal subculture, and some hard truths about what it means to be a young woman on the run, grasping at a future.

Hick the movie is produced by Lighthouse Entertainment and Taylor Lane Productions, with Stone River Productions serving as executive producer.

Though its first-person narrating voice is fast-paced, powerful and unquestionably authentic, Hick is a debut novel.

Beyond this voice, what makes the book so extraordinary is that, although all of the worst things imaginable do befall this 13-year-old girl, she is never defeated by them. Luli always fights back; she always resurfaces.

Set as a coming-of-age novel, Hick tracks the real perils that modern teenagers so often face. And it does so with bright wit, energy, and an indomitable spirit.

This is a book that will grab the reader from the first page and not let go.

And it is written by a woman who is becoming a cultural force in the hippest parts of Los Angeles.

Everyone Anton Waker grew up with is corrupt. His parents deal in stolen goods and his first career is a partnership venture with his cousin Aria selling forged passports and social security cards to illegal aliens. Anton longs for a less questionable way of living in the world and by his late twenties has reinvented himself as a successful middle manager. Then a routine security check suggests that things are not quite what they appear. And Aria begins blackmailing him to do one last job for her. But the seemingly simple job proves to have profound and unexpected repercussions.

Afterlives of the Saints is a woven gathering of groundbreaking essays that move through Renaissance anatomy and the Sistine Chapel, Borges' Library of Babel, the history of spontaneous human combustion, the dangers of masturbation, the pleasures of castration, and so forth -- each essay focusing on the story of a particular (and particularly strange) saint.

An 83-year-old obituary writer for a struggling, small-town newspaper finds herself embroiled in intrigue, stumbling onto the story of her career: a country girl has gone missing, perhaps whisked away by an itinerant aerial photographer. Or so it seems. It all could be simply a hoax, or a delusion, the child and child-thief invented from the desperate imagination of a lonely, lovelorn farm woman. The fragility of childhood, the strength of family, and the powerful rumor mills of small, rural towns--The Coffins of Little Hope tells the story of characters caught in the intricately woven webs of myth, legend and deception.

Esther Myles, an obituary writer in her eighties working for a struggling small-town newspaper, finds herself embroiled in intrigue, stumbling upon the story of her career as the story of the girl reaches far and wide, igniting controversy, attracting curiosity-seekers from all over the country to this dying rural town. And what do the gothic tales of Miranda and Desiree, the storybook sisters of Muscatine's series of novels, play in this town's survival and in the enduring mystery of Lenore?

The gentle-hearted Flavio Montoya returns,
now as the aged scion of his family, still tending
his sister Ramona's fields and wondering how all
of his family could have died before him. When
the mountains surrounding Guadalupe erupt in
flames, the history of the village seems to be set
loose in the smoke. The dead arrive and the silent
speak. When Flavio is accused of starting the fire
that quickly threatens to consume the village, the
disaster becomes one more mystery that he must
fold into his own memory, though he cannot quite
understand any of it.
A Santo in the Image of Crist bal Garc a is a
beautiful, funny, even epic tale of how all history is
finally personal.

Set against a backdrop of the current political and cultural upheaval in the US and Eastern Europe, The Unmade World is a thoughtful, scope-y literary novel with a dose of suspense that moves from Poland to California to the Hudson Valley and back to Poland. It covers a decade in the lives of an American journalist and a Polish small businessman turned petty criminal and the wrenching aftermath of an accidental, tragic encounter between these two on a snowy night in 2006 on the outskirts of Krakow. The accident costs the lives of the American journalist Richard Brennan's wife and daughter, an event that colors the rest of his life. It also leads to a downward spiral for Bogdan Baranowsk, leaving emotional scars as he suffers the seemingly inevitable loss of his business, his home, and his wife. The Unmade World is a story of ordinary, otherwise decent people from various backgrounds and circumstances who must learn how to live with the personal grief, sense of guilt, and the emotional consequences of violence. Along the way, the novel grapples with a spectrum of cultural and political issues. It includes a murder mystery wrapped around the corruption of major college sports, the pressures on immigrants and refugees in both the US and Poland, the fallout of political change, economic upheavals and armed conflicts--including the horrific destruction of Luhansk, Ukraine in 2014. It also references the 2016 presidential campaign, cultural politics in the American university, and the demise of print journalism, etc., though never in a dogmatic or overtly partisan way.

From the acclaimed author of Girl in the Arena, the story of a hit-and-run accident on an empty road that sets loose forces to tear a young girl's family apart. With the disappearance of her father, Mona's wrenching task is to make herself whole while holding on to her little sister and her mother, her dark secret memories, and her simmering fury.

Black Road unfolds in a small Ohio town, with one high school and one celebrated football team and one jumbo marching band. When the bad-boy star quarterback and his friends go too far one night with one of their pranks, a car crash severely injures two other students. The consequences of the crash and the court trials that follow reverberate through the town, reaching beyond the local community in haunting, almost surreal ways as the larger world seems to be turned upside down.

As the details leading up to the crash are revealed bit by bit, a surprising number of people are implicated the outsider teenager who lives alone in a trailer next to the Amish farm where the crash happened; a high school teacher who fights to bring goodness and beauty to young lives; an Indian doctor and her school-aged daughter who hopes to follow her brother to Harvard; a Japanese exchange student.

Watching from behind everything is an actual Greek chorus broken loose in time, Apollo and Artemis, lost souls trekking through the modern world

Masha Hamilton's fifth novel, What Changes Everything, is truly an American story: an exploration of our twisted, misguided, generous relationship with an enigmatic country -- Afghanistan. It is the story of Clarissa, who in a gamble to save her kidnapped husband's life makes the best decisions she can in the dark nights of Brooklyn, boldly rejecting the advice of U.S. authorities. It is also the story of Stela, who owns a used bookstore in Ohio and writes letter after letter in hopes of comprehending the loss of a son on an Afghan battlefield. And it's the stories of Mandy, the mother of a gravely wounded soldier from Texas, Danil, an angry Brooklyn street artist, and Todd, a career aid worker who for a moment let down his guard in a Kabul marketplace. At the same time, What Changes Everything tells the stories of two Afghans: Najibullah, the former president of Afghanistan during the Communist era, and Amin -- a fictional character, unlike Najib -- who as a boy tried to save Najibullah and failed, and who now risks his own life in a driven effort to help Todd.

When Michael Mewshaw receives a call from a stranger who says she has reason to believe he is her biological father, Mewshaw realizes he has been half dreading, half hoping for this to happen for over 30 years. Just like the young woman who wants to find the last piece to the puzzle of her life, he hopes to answer questions that have plagued him for decades. But first he has to make sure that she is who she claims to be. In this fascinating memoir, Mewhsaw confronts his own past, the chaos of his family, and complicated memories of the woman he once loved. His unusual role in the baby's birth, her adoption, and, now, her search for her biological parents sets the stage for a revealing personal odyssey that offers a quest for identity and a journey of discovery, an obsession with recapturing the past and righting old wrongs, the constant potential for disappointment balanced against the possibility of redemption. As he finds his old flame and her old lover, rediscovering who he was and who he has become, he finds his life enriched in the process.

In Mercy 6, David Bajo's courageous new medical thriller, four people collapse dead in the same instant within a newly renovated Los Angeles hospital. Dr. Mendenhall, the woman who is head of the emergency room, isn't convinced the cause of death is a contagion. But it's in the interests of the hospital administrators -- and of the world at large -- for people to think that it is. If the world knew the truth there could only be widespread panic. The hospital is immediately locked down. Information is suddenly being strictly controlled. Government troops encircle the hospital to enforce the quarantine, and other bodies arrive in ER. Working with an ally in pathology and a colleague outside the hospital, Mendenhall develops her understanding that what has taken these lives has global implications . . . and whatever it is, it's not a virus.

Having answered a Berlin newspaper advertisement for strong women who can cook and do farm work, Sophie Charlotte finds herself married with two sons on an Icelandic sheep farm, trying to sever cords of memory that lead back to the powerful love she knew in Germany and all that she lost there. When World War II began, Charlotte was attached to a supremely talented but politically furious painter in Berlin. But she would lose him twice: first to the resistance and then to the camps. More wounding for Charlotte, however, is the unforgiving trace of their daughter, Lena, who at five years old tragically disappeared into the chaos of the War.

This is an extraordinarily beautiful saga that links sure-footed portraits of wartime Berlin and the severity of life in the Icelandic countryside. Moving and genuinely affirming, Seal Woman is a many-colored portrayal of a strong woman's life broken in two stark and unforgiving worlds separated by the North Atlantic.

John Bonner is sure that anytime now he will recover from the sting of his recent separation from his wife. And he's begun to wonder if he truly wants to spend the rest of his days running the family scrap-metal business, an operation where his employees are likely to have made the very license plates they now shred. His sister, Octavia, has just returned to Ohio from Boston to nurture the pain of her own broken relationship, and she is more certain: Following in the footsteps of their imperious father is a recipe for emotional disaster.

But then two of John's more eccentric workmen discover thousands of dollars stashed in the trunk of a car, the remains of a drug deal gone bad. The question of what to do with this unexpected cash draws John and his sister into the lives of their newfound collaborators, and sends them all on a surprising journey of high jinx and the heart.

In The Metal Shredders, Nancy Zafris offers up a refreshingly wise, offbeat, and thoroughly convincing look at blue-collar America. Hers is a world rich in humor, steeped in closely held traditions, and filled with gently endearing, slightly crazed characters trying to discover just who they are. In the process they discover much about love, loyalty, family obligation, class--and yes, scrap.