What does it take to build a life from broken pieces? For Michelle Shepherd, the question is essential. On the foundations of an erratic and sometimes violent childhood, Michelle has created surprising success as an artist in British Columbia while caretaking her elderly father and his expat Vietnam war buddies. Michelle's father begins drinking and making risky, possibly criminal choices just as she unexpectedly falls in love with a theater director named Celeste-two situations for which she has little adult experience and few skills. When grisly evidence of a crime washes up beneath her remote cabin home, Michelle is convinced of her father's guilt and is forced to a reckoning with family secrets-some she's kept from others, and some she's kept from herself. Access to the past opens up surprising possibilities but also a minefield of difficult choices. Will Michelle brave those choices, or retreat into the safety of the familiar? Dark and atmospheric, rooted in the Pacific Northwest, Shepherd's Derelict is a portrait of a troubled found family and the sacrifices we make for love.

Shepherd's Derelict: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Bennett, A.G.

Literary

Paint Creek Press

"You listen to me, my girl" Ruth Douglass tells her daughter. "You've got three choices in this world, and only three. A woman can be a virgin, a wife, or a widow, and that's all there is."		Ruth Douglass should know. The central character in Laura Kalpakian's novel of three generations of Mormons, Ruth soon finds herself neither wife, widow, nor virgin. Born into genteel Salt Lake society, she marries Samuel Douglass and is flung into a hardscrabble life in frontier Idaho. Keeping her doubts about men, marriage and God to herself-this is 1890, after all-she sustains her family in a makeshift home. But when Samuel goes mad with religion, Ruth packs up the children and moves west to California. 	Intent on raising her six children impeccably, Ruth is nonetheless haunted by the lie that she told and the lie that she lives. Eventually, with the determination of a woman with few choices, she finds the courage to excavate her secret hopes and make a new life for herself. 	She presides over a loving and contentious cast: Dr. Lucius Tipton, the convivial cigar-smoking atheist who falls in love with Ruth; her rich, small-minded brother, Albert, who refuses to help her; Kitty, the daughter-in-law who defies the church, the community and the family bond. And the children-some of whom never lose faith, some of whom never find it-especially Eden, the bright star. 	These Latter Days is about reconciling what is expected of us with what we do. The Douglasses discover that within the bounds imposed by their world and their church, it is hard to do right; sometimes they must do what their hearts tell them. "It's that simple. And that hard," Ruth declares. 	Told candidly and compellingly, this story shows the ways in which families constrict us, root us, ground us, and at the same time give us the courage for rebellion.

These Latter Days

Kalpakian, Laura

To write a memoir is to take the grains of sand-individuals and particulars- and shape them into sandcastles. To make artful narrative of experience that, in the living of it, might have seemed random, even chaotic. Writing a memoir tames the unruly past, but it does not make it docile. Celebrated novelist Laura Kalpakian grew up in Southern California amid a blending of vastly different cultures. Her mother was born in Constantinople, only a toddler when the family, multi-lingual, urbanite Armenians, left Turkey and immigrated to Los Angeles after World War I. Her father joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor, uprooting from an Idaho tribe of restless, rural, hardscrabble Mormons. These memoir essays explore both sides' colorful anecdotal inheritance as, over generations, their stories are codified, re-shaped to process unspoken pain.With candor and humor Kalpakian chronicles her stint as a teen reporter and gossip columnist. As a wayward apprentice in her twenties she lollygags through Paris imagining herself to be a writer, but lacking the courage to write. She masquerades as a graduate student among the ponderous Structuralists while secretly writing stories, none of them published. One of these stories escalates into one hundred pages, blossoms into a novel that sells to a major publishing house and collects critical applause. Commercially, the book flops. Her second novel, These Latter Days is rejected and her powerful editor dies. Returning to California, now the single mother of two young sons, she refuses to give up on These Latter Days-a book ironically rooted in Mormon traditions she had long since spurned, and a town she thought she had left behind forever. The Unruly Past asks questions of the author's past: the Armenian diaspora, Mormon tribalism, the warring instincts to revel or preserve, raising children in order to let them go. These essays are not content to simply tell what happened. They explore the larger, deeper chasms, the cracks and fissures of what must be imagined before it can be remembered.

The Unruly Past: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Caveat

In 1916, rainmaker Hank Beecham agrees to return to his hometown of St. Elmo, California, to rescue it from a devastating drought and bring honor to his family's besmirched name.

United States

"Sacred to the Memory of Elvis," proclaims a homely, front porch memorial in a shabby neighborhood. Even years after his death, Joyce Jackson keeps the Christmas lights twinkling, and the flowers fresh. She keeps the faith as she builds a life for her two daughters, Priscilla and Lisa Marie. Joyce's benevolence is inspired by Elvis, but her vision is entirely her own. Her generosity of spirit resonates among a cast of memorable characters: holy rollers, rock and rollers, cops and robbers, refugees and social workers-one of whom inadvertently reawakens Joyce's old nemesis. Marge Mason believes that Joyce is a welfare cheat with bad taste in men and music and too much spunk for a woman on public assistance. In this contest Joyce will need every bit of her strength and spiritual largesse.Rippling with rhythm and the blues, Graced Land celebrates the power of music and love connecting the iconic King with a struggling single mother.

Graced Land

Michigan's Detroit (Jody's Michigan Adventures)

Arrathoon, L.

Summer of the Bear: An Historical Novel about the Anishinabeg and the Fur Traders in Michigan

Arrathoon, Leigh A.

Kevin Murphy's Eagle from the Dawn is the second book in an adventure-packed series of historical fictions. Kevin relives a summer spent at his uncle Matt's ranch in Grant, Montana. He and the son of his uncle's Nez Perce partner, Peter Taksoukt, follow the route of Lewis and Clark and branch off to observe a study of the cougar in the Frank Church Wilderness of No Return. The boys learn to respect each other's cultures, and Kevin discovers the secret of how to love and let go, which is the key to lifelong friendships. The history of Lewis and Clark and the Nez Perces is state-of-the art.

Eagle from Dawn: An Historical Novel about Lewis and Clark and the Nez Perces

Leigh A. Arrathoon

Kevin Murphy's Summer of the Bear: An Historical Novel about the Anishinabeg and the Fur Traders in Michigan

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