Set against the backdrop of a remote location in the throes of rapid development, The Scent of Distant Family is a contemporary novel that expands, even across geologic time, our sense of who we choose to consider family.

Thanks for This Riot explores the limits of kindness, the weight of being needed, and the fear of being misunderstood. A group counselor is taunted by a truth-divining piano bench, a voice actor shouts her abortion at the state capitol, a tired caregiver tangles with a pair of stand-up comics, a small-town newspaper office shelters an otherworldly tattletale, a backwoods acupuncturist leans on her least-exciting offspring, a girl in a strapless bra takes a vengeful go-kart ride, and a woman gets surgery to lower her expectations (she thinks it went “okay”). 

Iron and Mary Barrett’s farming family is rural royalty, their success symbolized by a magnificent three-story house, Mary’s Place. But when bank examiners apply new ratings for agricultural loans in the 1980s, the family’s belief that its prosperity is a natural outcome of hard work is sent reeling. Mary’s Place is an unforgettable tribute to the rural families who weathered one of the worst agricultural disasters in American history.

Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body presents the voice of a daughter of immigrant parents, now gone, from Lebanon and Syria and of Armenian descent. Often interrupted with monologues and rants, the poems grapple with the disorder of loss and the body’s failures. Ultimately, Bedikian contemplates the concept of fate, destiny (jagadakeer), and the excavation of memory—whether to question familial inheritance or claim medical diagnoses.

In 1918 a famed general of the Russian White Army battled through the Red Army to save Emperor Nicholas II—but he arrived too late. The Romanovs had already been murdered. In this thrilling true-life detective story, we follow Anna, the general’s courageous young daughter, who fled across the continent and boarded a ship with her husband to escape the bloodshed. Beneath her bunk was a box, and in this box lay grisly evidence of what had become of Russia’s royal family, the Romanovs. Generations later, Anna’s grandson Peter Sarandinaki set out to finish his great-grandfather’s mission to find the Romanovs’ remains.

In Buffalo Soldiers in California Brian G. Shellum follows the experiences of Captain Young and the Ninth Cavalry in the Golden State, from life at the Presidio and the challenges of army life in a large city to summers patrolling Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks to missions training with the California National Guard. 

Tom Warder, born on the Pine Ridge Reservation, works at the LaCreek refuge, which hosts the nation’s last remaining trumpeter swans. The refuge manager assigns Tom, who owns land adjacent to the refuge, to be the swans’ day-to-day caretaker. Tom’s land isn’t productive enough to make a living from, so he leases grazing rights to white rancher Bart Johnson. An Endangered Species is the tale of these two families, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, bound to circumstances beyond their control, and struggling to survive on the upper Great Plains during the 1960s.

Fantastical, sensual, and as beguilingly strange as they are insightful and real, the stories of All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere are centered around intimate familial or romantic relationships, featuring protagonists who make awesome discoveries—from the beautiful to the horrible—in seemingly mundane situations. The protagonists in each story come from marginalized communities, which sometimes exacerbates their problems but always allows for unique perspectives and epiphanies.

Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist traces the creative coming of age of a mill-town feminist. Sherrie Flick, whose childhood spanned the 1970s rise and 1980s collapse of the steel industry, returned to Pittsburgh in the late 1990s, witnessing the region’s before and its after.