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Feature and Contest

Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly

New York socialite Caroline Ferriday's world is forever changed when Hitler’s army invades Poland in September 1939 --- and then sets its sights on France. Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish teenager, is drawn deeper into her role as courier for the underground resistance movement. For the ambitious young German doctor, Herta Oberheuser, an ad for a government medical position seems her ticket out of a desolate life. Once hired, though, she finds herself trapped in a male-dominated realm of Nazi secrets and power. The lives of these three women are set on a collision course when the unthinkable happens and Kasia is sent to Ravensbrück, the notorious Nazi concentration camp for women.

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The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith

Dinitia Smith’s novel recounts George Eliot’s honeymoon in Venice in June 1880 following her marriage to a handsome young man 20 years her junior. When she agreed to marry John Walter Cross, Eliot was recovering from the death of George Henry Lewes, her beloved companion of 26 years. Eliot was bereft: left at the age of 60 to contemplate profound questions about her physical decline, her fading appeal and the prospect of loneliness. In her youth, Mary Ann Evans --- who would later be known as George Eliot --- was a country girl, considered too plain to marry, so she educated herself in order to secure a livelihood.

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When We Meet Again by Kristin Harmel

Emily Lyons has been laid off from her investigative reporting job and finds herself at loose ends. Into that void steps someone she thought she'd never hear from again, her estranged father --- and he needs her help. Emily's not much interested in helping her deadbeat dad, but he wants her to help him track down his own father, who disappeared after the war. Despite her misgivings, Emily is hungry for roots and family, so she begins to dig and uncovers a fascinating era in American history. 

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Twain's End by Lynn Cullen

In TWAIN'S END, Lynn Cullen reimagines the tangled relationships between Mark Twain, his private secretary Isabel V. Lyon, and his business manager Ralph Ashcroft, as well as the little-known love triangle between Helen Keller, her teacher Anne Sullivan Macy, and Anne’s husband John Macy, which comes to light during their visit to Twain’s Connecticut home in 1909. Add to the party a furious Clara Clemens, smarting from her own failed love affair, and carefully kept veneers shatter.

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Blueprints by Barbara Delinsky

Caroline MacAfee is a skilled carpenter, and her daughter Jamie is a talented architect. Together they are the faces of “Gut It!,” a home renovation series on local public television. But when Caroline is told the network wants her daughter to replace her as host, she is devastated. For Jamie, life changes overnight when, soon after learning of the host shift, her father and his new wife die in a car accident that orphans their two-year-old son. Who am I? Both women ask, as the blueprints they've built their lives around suddenly need revising.

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Did You Ever Have A Family by Bill Clegg

On the eve of her daughter’s wedding, June Reid’s life is completely devastated when a shocking disaster takes the lives of her daughter, her daughter’s fiancé, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend, Luke --- her entire family, all gone in a moment. And June is the only survivor. Alone and directionless, June drives across the country, away from her small Connecticut town. In her wake, a community emerges, weaving a beautiful and surprising web of connections through shared heartbreak.

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Heart of Glass: A Memoir by Wendy Lawless

Before downtown Manhattan was scrubbed clean, gentrified, and overrun with designer boutiques and trendy eateries and bars, it was the center of a burgeoning art scene. Running from the shipwreck of her glamorous and unstable childhood with a volatile mother, Wendy Lawless landed in the center of it all. She navigated this demi-monde of jaded punk rockers, desperate actors, pulsing parties and unexpected run-ins with her own past as she made every mistake of youth, looked for love in all the wrong places, and eventually learned how to grow up on her own.

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A Place for Us by Harriet Evans

When Martha, a wife and mother of three, sits down to write out the invitations to her 80th birthday celebration, she knows that what she is planning to reveal at the party could ruin the idyllic life she and her husband David have spent over 50 years building. As the story unfolds, each character reveals the secrets, joys and tragedies they are wrestling with through the confines of the family. What will happen when Martha finally tells the truth?

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The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty by Amanda Filipacchi

In the heart of New York City, a group of artistic friends struggles with society's standards of beauty. At the center are Barb and Lily, two women at opposite ends of the beauty spectrum, but with the same problem: Each fears she will never find a love that can overcome her looks. To complicate matters, Barb and Lily discover that they may have a murderer in their midst. With biting wit and offbeat charm, Amanda Filipacchi illuminates the labyrinthine relationship between beauty, desire and identity, asking at every turn: What does it truly mean to allow oneself to be seen?

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Jump Cut: An Ellie Foreman Mystery by Libby Fischer Hellmann

Hired to produce a candyfloss profile of Chicago-based aviation giant, Ellie Foreman is dismayed when company VP Charlotte Hollander trashes the production and cancels the project. Ellie believes Hollander was spooked by shots of a specific man in the video footage. But when Ellie arranges to meet the man, he’s killed by a subway train before they can talk. In the confusion, she finds a seemingly abandoned pack of cigarettes with a flash drive inside that belonged to the now dead man. Ellie and her boyfriend Luke try to find answers, but they don’t realize how far they ventured into the dangerous echelons of hidden power where more lives are on the line, including theirs.

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