Vacationland
10 best books like Vacationland (Sarah Stonich): Black Venus, The Siren's Secret, Erekos, Safe from the Sea, The Empty Chair, We'll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger's Daughter, The Lone Pilgrim, This Magnificent Desolation, Byzantium: Stories, Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse
| Author | James MacManus |
| ISBN | 1250014239 |
A vivid novel of Charles Baudelaire and his lover Jeanne Duval, the Haitian cabaret singer who inspired his most famous and controversial poems, set in nineteenth-century Paris.
For readers who have been drawn to The Paris Wife, Black Venus captures the artistic scene in the great French...
Julia’s life has gone from complicated to nearly impossible! When Julia loses her shapeshifting powers and her appearance changes in alarming ways, she flees to Sirenity, where she learns an incredible secret about her mother. In this thrilling sequel, Julia must take greater risks and make bigger...
| Author | A.M. Tuomala |
| ISBN | 1936460033 |
Tuomala has some of the most lush, evocative prose I've had the pleasure to read in awhile. It's a little strangely formal in some places, but the story moves with a dreamlike rhythm through a densely imagined world. Most of the characters manage to sidestep many of the tired tropes that plague high fantasy,...
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...
| Author | Bruce Wagner |
| ISBN | 0399165886 |
Composed of two companion novellas, The Empty Chair is a profound, heart-wrenching piece of spiritual storytelling from Bruce Wagner, the internationally acclaimed author of such novels as Dead Stars, I’m Losing You and Force Majeure. In First Guru, a fictional Wagner narrates the tale of a Buddhist...
We'll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger's Daughter
| Author | Rachael Hanel |
| ISBN | 0816683468 |
Rachael Hanel’s name was inscribed on a gravestone when she was eleven years old. Yet this wasn’t at all unusual in her world: her father was a gravedigger in the small Minnesota town of Waseca, and death was her family’s business. Her parents were forty-two years old and in good health when they...
| Author | Laurie Colwin |
| ISBN | 0060958936 |
This collection of stories about love and privacy is serious , funny, tender, and alive with the elegance and spirit that characterize Laurie Colwin's work. In these stories, the reader moves among young men and women: pianists, historians, book illustrators, architects; women who are composed...
This Magnificent Desolation
| Author | Thomas O'Malley |
| ISBN | 1608192792 |
Duncan's entire world is the orphanage where he lives, a solitary outpost on the open plains of northern Minnesota. Aged ten in 1980, he has no memories of his life before now, but he has stories that he recites like prayers: the story of how his mother brought him here during the worst blizzard of the century;...
| Author | Ben Stroud |
| ISBN | 1555976468 |
Winner of the Bakeless Prize for Fiction, an imaginative debut that ranges from Havana to Berlin.
Ancient cities and fallen empires come to life in this masterful collection. In the Byzantine court, a noble with a crippled hand is called upon to ensure that a holy man poses no threat to the throne....
Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse
| Author | Faith Sullivan |
| ISBN | 1571311114 |
Throughout her life, Nell Stillman has struggled to find meaning in an increasingly chaotic world. A complicated marriage to a boorish husband; an early widowhood spent longing for her congressman lover; the loss of her child, a shell shocked WWI hero — her road has not been easy. But somehow she manages...
| Author | Jon Hassler |
| ISBN | 0829423575 |
“Hassler’s brilliance has always been his ability to achieve the depth of real literature through such sure-handed, no-gimmicks, honest language that the result appears effortless.”
—Richard Russo, New York Times Book Review
“Hassler has tapped every pulse with his pen....
| Author | John Reimringer |
| ISBN | 1571310800 |
Let me begin today, illumined by Thy light, to destroy this part of the natural man which lives in me in its entirety, the obstacle that constantly keeps me from Thy Love. Taught this prayer as a boy by his grandfather, James Dressler recites it each time he’s tempted by earthly desires. Originally drawn...
| Author | William Swanson |
| ISBN | 0873515609 |
At 9:00 on the morning of March 6, 1963, in the quiet neighborhood of Highland Park, Mrs. Fritz Pearson glanced out her window and saw something almost unimaginable: slumped on the front steps of the home across the street was a woman, partially clothed in a blue bathrobe and bloodied beyond recognition....
Whispering Bodies: A Roy Belkin Disaster
| Author | Jesse Michaels |
| ISBN | 1593765304 |
Roy Belkin, a reclusive man, Internet troll and neurotic ritualist stars In Whispering Bodies, the debut novel from Jesse Michaels. Belkin must begin each day with the task he calls The Service: visiting Christian chat-rooms to reply to users innocent questions with mocking answers. “Why do they...
Death stalks the haunted, windswept prairie in this chilling sequel to Wide Open
Now that she's solved her sister's murder, Hallie Michaels has left the army and isn't sure what to do next. Her relationship with deputy Boyd Davies is tentative, there's still distance between her and her...
| Author | Linda LeGarde Grover |
Set in northern Minnesota, The Road Back to Sweetgrass follows Dale Ann, Theresa, and Margie, a trio of American Indian women, from the 1970s to the present, observing their coming of age and the intersection of their lives as they navigate love, economic hardship, loss, and changing family dynamics...
| Author | Richard Russo |
| ISBN | 1608931854 |
In what many perceive as a coldly relentless digital age, Pulitzer-prize winning author Richard Russo has teamed up with his daughter, artist Kate Russo, to present this tribute to the printed book. This handsome and inventive format—four individually bound volumes gathered in a slipcase—combines...
Kekaju and the Hidden Swamp
| Author | Robert W. Sweeting |
| ISBN | 1470162261 |
A mother that disappeared without a trace, a sudden tragic death and then being forcibly uprooted from your home. That is what Zach, a thirteen year old boy endures when a ghostly girl kills his father. Being strong willed, Zach is determined not to leave his home in New Orleans until supernatural events...
Rudiger doesn't kill because he wants to. He kills because he needs to. When the sadistic Preacherman stole the last bit of Rudiger's already troubled childhood soul, Rudiger lost himself forever. He has committed atrocities even he cannot explain in his quest for the End of Days, a release from his...
Force of Habit: Sister Madeleine Investigates
| Author | Cash Peters |
| ISBN | 0984887628 |
When news reaches Sister Madeleine that her old friend Howard Barley, a global publishing tycoon, has died in grisly circumstances, she is shocked and very suspicious. Even more so when she learns that Howard left his entire fortune and business empire to her.Forced to abandon their familiar convent...
| Author | Ava Finch |
| ISBN | 1503947688 |
RayAnne Dahl goes fishing for a different life, catching much more than she’d bargained for...
Having fled the testosterone-soaked world of pro fishing to finally settle in her Minneapolis fixer-upper, thirty-something RayAnne unexpectedly lands at the helm of the first all-women fishing...
Swept into the Darkness: (Chronicles of the Celestial)
| Author | LaTaeya Lane |
| ISBN | 0615697445 |
Sydney London is no ordinary twenty-four year old. Ever since she was a child she has had unique out of this world abilities. Suffering from a near death experience and surviving a deadly car crash Sydney is no stranger to death and loss. Cut off from the world around her she encounters an Angel and eventually...
Writing flash fiction – short or very short stories is an art form. It's almost as hard as poetry to get an image and a story into so small a space.
Helena Mallett manages it almost 75 times with 75 stories in this eclectic collection of tales, most of which work wonderfully well. In these little...
Too Far to Say Far Enough
| Author | Nancy N. Rue |
| ISBN | 1434764907 |
Allison Chamberlain has done everything God required of her—but as He continues to nudge her in the third and final book of The Reluctant Prophet series, she is ready to say, “Enough!”Even with two Sacrament Houses open, the Sisters’ second hand clothing boutique making its debut, and the...
| Author | Maria Padian |
| ISBN | 0375865802 |
At Maquoit High School, Tom Bouchard has it made: captain and star of the soccer team, boyfriend to one of the prettiest, most popular girls, and third in his class, likely to have his pick of any college, if he ever bothers filling out his applications. But life in his idyllic small Maine town quickly gets...
