Shortlisted for the 2016 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing It is 1554 in the desert of Rajasthan. On a rare night of rain, a daughter is born to a family of Hindu temple dancers just as India’s new Mughal Emperor Akbar sets his sights on their home, the fortress city of Jaisalmer, and the other Princely States around it. Fearing a bleak future, Adhira’s father, the temple’s dance master—against his wife and sons’ protests—puts his faith in tradition and in his last child for each to save the other: he insists that Adhira is destined to “marry” the temple’s deity and to give herself to a wealthy patron. Thus she must live in submission as a woman revered and reviled. But Adhira’s father may not have the last word. Adhira grows into an exquisite dancer, and after one terrible evening she must make a choice—one that will carry her family’s story and their dance to a startling new beginning.

A grumpy lobster fisherman tosses a fashion influencer’s impeccably curated life overboard in the next romantic comedy from international bestselling author Amy Lea. In a last-ditch effort to rescue her brand from the brink of irrelevance, Boston fashion influencer Melanie Karlsen finds herself in a rural fishing village on the east coast of Canada. The only thing scarier than nature itself? The burly and bearded bed-and-breakfast owner and fisherman, Evan Whaler—who single-handedly disproves the theory that Canadians are “nice.” After a boating accident lands Evan unconscious in the hospital, Mel is mistaken for his fiancée by his welcoming yet quirky family, who are embroiled in a long-standing feud over the B&B. In a bold attempt to mend family fences, Mel agrees to fake their engagement for one week in exchange for Evan’s help with her social media content. Amid long hikes and campfire chats, reeling in their budding feelings for each other proves more difficult by the day. But is Mel willing to sacrifice her picture-perfect life in the city for a chance at a true, unfiltered love in the wild?

Chibelu is a happily married man with a well-paying job in Gaborone, Botswana. He has a very flirtatious secretary He makes a decision that leads to a transfer to Tsebeyatonki village, a very superstitious village... Snakes somehow start finding their way into his office. There is one common disturbing thing amongst them: they are all turning up dead... It suddenly dawns on him that he made the wrong decision. But its too late...

When Attis McCurtain, a Vietnam veteran of mixed Choctaw and other origins, dies, his uncle commands Attis' younger brother Cole to find and bury his brother's bones, and in the process Cole and his friend Mundo Morales come to terms with their mixed heritages

Valerie Tagwira has a gift for capturing the mood of a social or political moment: its concerns, unease, compromises and hopes. So it is with her second novel, Trapped. Trapped explores the lives of three characters: Unesu is a doctor, Cashleen trained as a journalist and Delta qualified as a chemical engineer. Unesu is employed, but his work exposes him to the deficiencies in the system every day as he faces the challenges of life and death. Each of the two young women, good friends, daunted by having their job applications repeatedly rejected, make moral and ethical compromises in order to find work, or at least an income that will pay their bills. These three individuals provide the pivot around which the action unfolds, introducing the reader to people and situations that paint a vital picture of life in Harare at a time of crisis, when survival depends on courage, determination, friendship and humour.

Her Prince Charming? Sister Tabitha was an effi cient nurse, but when it came to matters of the heart she was less sure of herself. So when she fell in love, she had no idea how to deal with her feelings. Was that why the Dutch surgeon Marius van Beek called her Cinderella? If only Marius would ride up on a white horse and ask for her hand in marriage. But people lived happily ever after only in fairy tales, didn’t they?

A Good Morning America Book Club Pick and New York Times Bestseller! From debut author Asha Lemmie, “a lovely, heartrending story about love and loss, prejudice and pain, and the sometimes dangerous, always durable ties that link a family together.” —Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Nightingale Kyoto, Japan, 1948. “Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist.” Such is eight-year-old Noriko “Nori” Kamiza’s first lesson. She will not question why her mother abandoned her with only these final words. She will not fight her confinement to the attic of her grandparents’ imperial estate. And she will not resist the scalding chemical baths she receives daily to lighten her skin. The child of a married Japanese aristocrat and her African American GI lover, Nori is an outsider from birth. Her grandparents take her in, only to conceal her, fearful of a stain on the royal pedigree that they are desperate to uphold in a changing Japan. Obedient to a fault, Nori accepts her solitary life, despite her natural intellect and curiosity. But when chance brings her older half-brother, Akira, to the estate that is his inheritance and destiny, Nori finds in him an unlikely ally with whom she forms a powerful bond—a bond their formidable grandparents cannot allow and that will irrevocably change the lives they were always meant to lead. Because now that Nori has glimpsed a world in which perhaps there is a place for her after all, she is ready to fight to be a part of it—a battle that just might cost her everything. Spanning decades and continents, Fifty Words for Rain is a dazzling epic about the ties that bind, the ties that give you strength, and what it means to be free.

A Foreward Reviews Indie Fab 2014 Finalist for Book of the Year A. L. A. Sophie Brody Award 2014 nominee Early in The Sweetness, an inquisitive young girl asks her grandmother why she is carrying nothing but a jug of sliced lemons and water when they are forced by the Germans to evacuate their ghetto. "Something sour to remind me of the sweetness," she tells her, setting the theme for what they must remember to survive. Set during World War II, the novel is the parallel tale of two Jewish girls, cousins, living on separate continents, whose strikingly different lives ultimately converge. Brooklyn-born Mira Kane is the eighteen-year-old daughter of a well-to-do manufacturer of women’s knitwear in New York. Her cousin, eight-year-old Rosha Kaninsky, is the lone survivor of a family in Vilna exterminated by the invading Nazis. But unbeknownst to her American relatives, Rosha did not perish. Desperate to save his only child during a round-up of their ghetto, her father thrusts her into the arms of a Polish Catholic candle maker, who then hides her in a root cellar─putting her own family at risk. The headstrong and talented Mira, who dreams of escaping Brooklyn for a career as a fashion designer, finds her ambitions abruptly thwarted when, traumatized at the fate of his European relatives, her father becomes intent on safeguarding his loved ones from threats of a brutal world, and all the family must challenge his unuttered but injurious survivor guilt. Though the American Kanes endure the experience of the Jews who got out, they reveal how even in the safety of our lives, we are profoundly affected by the dire circumstances of others.