In the winter of 2012 seventy-nine year old Somerset travels back to his ancestral home in idyllic Drums, Pennsylvania to renovate his dilapidated house. Burdened by the loss of his beloved wife, the long-ago disappearance of his rebellious son, and angry at God and at himself Somerset hopes to reach a final understanding of the meaning of his life. While a blizzard threatens to undermine his project and "Armageddon" draws near, Somerset discovers a boy squatting on the property. As they unearth objects in the house lost to time Somerset revisits his father's cruelty and the accident that cost him his brother's life. He recalls his dreamy mother and her transience and the punishment inflicted upon her by his father. While a murder of crows harass and torment him Somerset's mind circles back to meeting and falling in love with his wife Winona and creating the joy and pain that was his son, Cole, who went missing thirty years before. Part elegy, part history, part existential ghost tale The Stove-Junker is a harrowing, lyrical meditation on loss, heartbreak, and the power of memory.

The Stove-Junker

Literature & Fiction

Kalsi, S.K.

Literary

Little Feather Books, Inc.

A heartbreaking tale that never loses sight of hope, or our remarkable ability to access and claim our own resilience. Poignant and riveting, Myths of a Merciful God takes us on the unforgettable journey of one woman's quest to overcome unimaginable loss. At the heart of the story is a profoundly difficult question: How does one come back from a tragedy as unspeakable as the death of a child? Through the literal and figurative journey upon which Sarah embarks in the aftermath of this loss, and the people she encounters along the way, Myths of a Merciful God explores the concepts of divine retribution and intervention versus the gaping silence of an indifferent universe, moral turpitude versus the virtue of well-kept secrets, and whether religion - or its absence - helps, hinders, or makes no difference in one's ability to find a way back toward wholeness.

Myths of a Merciful God

Ceilan, Cynthia

Contemporary

In this moving and funny memoir that spans the six years following the author's purported recovery from anorexia, Dana Lise Shavin offers a candid and ultimately optimistic window into the mindset and machinations of a mental illness whose tentacles reached deep into her life, long after she was considered "cured." In 1981, Shavin graduated from college with a BA in Psychology. It had been a difficult venture that included an expulsion, a four-month institutionalization, and a multitude of transfers. By the time it was over, she was convinced she was cured, and that it was time to start curing others. "I’m ready," she told her parents, her therapist, and friends—all of whom shook their heads in horror at her 95-pound, 5’9” frame. Undaunted, she landed a job as a counselor in a halfway house for drug and alcohol addicts. If anyone knew what it took to become a happy, functioning adult, Shavin was convinced she was the one. As anyone would suspect, the burden of self-contempt, faulty logic, and interpersonal turmoil that are the character traits of depressive disorders and addictions do not miraculously disappear once medication and therapy have taken effect. Where, then, do these dangerous obsessions, such as the wish for obliteration (which often co-exists with the wish for immortality), go once a person sets foot on the road to recovery? For Shavin, they lived beneath the radar of her supposed new-found health, disguising themselves in the falling-down houses she happily moved into and the dangerous neighborhoods she somehow didn't fear. They announced themselves in the deeply flawed men she professed to adore, the food rituals she thought were normal, the ordinary sex she could not have, and, most profoundly, her inability to acknowledge her father’s illness and encroaching death. While many writers have written candidly and eloquently about their struggles with depression, addictions, and eating disorders, those stories usually conclude once there is progress toward recovery. Beyond recovery—whether from addiction, illness, the death of a loved one, or divorce—there is another story, one that is about how we re-join the world, and, in the living years that follow the darkness, pursue a life that is creative, engaged, and deeply felt in one's body.

The Body Tourist

Shavin, Dana Lise

Religion & Spirituality

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