Fiction

Gerald Toner’s new short-story collection offers a fresh take on the holiday season, exploring characters and settings beyond the usual Christmas tropes. Toner’s unique blend of humor, heart, and thought-provoking storytelling captures the true spirit of Christmas: a time for redemption, hope, and unexpected miracles. The stories offer a refreshing alternative to the overly sentimental depictions of Christmas, reminding us of the joy and meaning to be found in the everyday.

In this historical novel, a young woman travels to her great-grandmother’s Kentucky cabin seeking answers. Her great-grandmother, a former slave, shares stories of their ancestors’ lives and the strength of women in the face of adversity. These stories help the younger woman find direction and chart her future.

When a one-of-a-kind Jackson Stradivarius violin disappears from a conference, master luthier Greg Zhu and his husband, Presbyterian minister Dan Randolph, must team up with the authorities to clear Greg’s name, catch the thief, and recover the priceless violin before it is lost to the arts and antiquities black market.

16-year-old Duncan Page is given an old wooden box containing an ancient, otherworldly blade as he evacuates London in 1941. As Nazi spies hunt for the box and Duncan, a secret society emerges from the shadows of Oxford to protect the treasure.

This anthology of fictional short stories and poems spotlights cancer's ravaging impact on Appalachian Kentucky. Written by high school and undergraduate students from the region, the authors leverage their own lived experiences and knowledge of cancer to convey realistic stories about the pain and disruption that cancer causes individuals, families, and entire communities across the Appalachian region.

In this historical novel based on the real-life experiences of author C.W. Shumate's great-grandfather, a rural Kentuckian joins the Union Army to fight in the Civil War. An exhilarating journey through American history and a stirring account of war and peace, triumph and defeat, hostility and friendship, love lost and found, and the elusive pursuit of unconditional redemption.

The CIA must call back Chip and Marci for one last mission when Mossad captures international assassins Katrina and Ilya Popov. With jet fighter clashes in the skies and submarine standoffs below the ice, the Russians are making their play to control the Arctic. Can Chip and Marci help end this dangerous game at the top of the world?

Retired Marine Chip Rogers and his fiancee Marci Tanner are thrust back into the world of political and military intrigue when the CIA discovers the Lake House Cabal is not yet defeated.

Retired Marine Chip Rogers and his fiancee Marci Tanner must stop an international crime ring as they attempt to influence the American presidential election by sabotaging a pandemic vaccine.

This harrowing work of historical fiction follows a German family who arrive in Philadelphia in 1746 after the father signs an indenture contract for his family to work toward a free and secure life in the New World. Once there, they are put on auction blocks and sold off to unscrupulous masters. Told by the family's living descendants, this chronicle of betrayal, fear, grief, and murder is ultimately a story of hope, love, and perseverance.

In his second novel, real-life retired US ambassador and arms negotiator Thomas Graham Jr. has written a taut political thriller set within the United States government, filled with rogue military, domestic rebellion, and intense intra-governmental struggles to save the country from a corrupt and dangerous president.

Novels about the Civil War abound, but few address the war's impact on women or relationships between white women and enslaved women. As violence, political division, racism, and gender inequality unfold in this historical novel about a young woman living in Bowling Green, KY, the story becomes a compelling tale of contemporary significance.

Christmas is a time for memories and celebration, yet it's also ripe with emotion, drama … and revelation. Midway, KY native Bob Rouse's collection of ten holiday stories pulls at the holiday heartstrings – and taps on the funny bone – of any reader who ever experienced the warmth, the sadness, or the insanity of Christmas.

Whatever happened to Lydia Bennett, the brash troublemaker from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice? Did she continue to wreak havoc with her impulsive ways? Or did married life help her settle down? Lovingly Yours, Lydia lets us peek into her diary, her correspondence, and the letters of her friends and family. From the manor houses of Regency England, to the battlefields at Waterloo, Lydia is always in the thick of things.

This new work of historical fiction from author Fred Schloemer explores life in Kentucky during the buildup to the Civil War. In it, Sarah Brinley is a plain spinster from Pittsburgh, recently impoverished by the death of her abolitionist parents. Desperate for work, she accepts a post as governess for the son of a wealthy Kentucky planter – but once there, she finds the job, the plantation, and its people far from what she expected. Where the River Birches Beckon puts a fresh and romantic spin on actual events and people in a suspenseful tale of love, loss, courage, and loyalty.

Author Sue Ballard provides a thoroughly researched, fictionalized autobiography of frontiersman Daniel Boone's wife, Rebecca Bryan Boone, a woman who deserves tribute for her role in carving new homes and new lives in the primitive and dangerous Kentucky wilderness. Ballard's description of Rebecca's day-to-day life is accurate in each detail, from raising their many children, farming, and kitchen work, to her hourly prayers and waiting in loneliness for the return of her trailblazing husband. A must-read for all who love early American and Kentucky history.

Author Fred Schloemer's first novel follows D.W. Singer through a life spent escaping his troubles — an unhappy childhood, an unplanned pregnancy, and his years in the Vietnam War — through fantasy and make believe. The story is a tribute to the redemptive powers of community theater and the unsung heroes whose talent, dedication, and hard work have made it such an important and beloved part of the national arts scene.

In his new short story collection, Gerald Toner writes about the small miracles that are revealed to ordinary people during the Christmas holiday season. Though their occupations are as varied as the circumstances in which they find themselves, each of the book's characters, while grinding through the ordinary events of ordinary Decembers, find a moment of Christmas magic in the midst of their misadventures.

After discovering the mysterious powers of a musty old Scottish sporran, sixth-grader Jacob Boyd is plunged into a dangerous adventure deep in the catacombs beneath Edinburgh Castle, where unseen perils—and the fate of the world—await him in the dark. For young adult readers, this is the start of an exciting new series.