Tom, a successful businessman in Chicago has gone to Northern Michigan on a hunt. His childhood friend has gone missing and Tom is determined to find him. The search for the lost man begins as a mystery and evolves into an act of redemption. Tom will stop at nothing to find his friend and discover the truth behind his disappearance.

Permafrost: A Novel (The Frost Trilogy, 1)

Literature & Fiction

Robertson, Peter

Literary

Gibson House Press

A decade and a half after finding death and deceit in Northern Michigan, Tom has divorced and relocated to Boulder, Colorado and has given up the reins of his lucrative business interests to his long-suffering employee, Nye Prior, for a life of craft beer and biking. He isn’t necessarily any richer or happier, but he is certainly older and fitter. On an early morning ride, Tom sees a young homeless man pulled from the flooded Boulder Creek. The death isn't very unusual; in fact another homeless man had drowned in the creek just a month ago. The Boulder cops have certainly seen it before but Tom hasn’t and his instincts kick in with a vengeance. He is soon riding the creek paths with a whole new purpose: to find the killer before the next deadly spring flood arrives.

Mission: A Novel (The Frost Trilogy, 2)

Set in the late ’70s, A Girl Called Sidney: The Coldest Place by rock musician Courtney Yasmineh is a searing, nerve-rattling story of a mature 17-year-old whose family disintegrates in spectacular fashion in affluent suburban Chicago. After first spiriting her mother away and then running away herself to the family’s remote Northwoods cabin in Minnesota, Sidney challenges herself to survive alone and find her voice over the course of a brutal winter. The narrative takes the reader on a dark and moody ride back and forth in both time and place, between Chicago and a tiny rural town. Getting inside Sidney’s head as she tries to make sense of a cast of characters – family, hangers-on, and old and new friends – the novel examines the roots of their dysfunction while Sidney plots the future and works to make real her pursuit of music. With appeal to readers of the recent rash of women rocker bios – and contemporary fiction of the heartland – the story looks with a fresh perspective back to a distinct time and the experiences of a young woman that will resonate with many adults.

A Girl Called Sidney: The Coldest Place

Yasmineh, Courtney

United States

In this luminous novel, the all-too-human experiences of fear, love and loss become amplified with potentially disastrous consequences. In 1960s Brazil, an indigenous group is on the brink of a tragedy, the dimensions of which they are only beginning to grasp. A small band of disaffected government agents, academics and visionaries is determined to fight for their cause. Among them is James Ardmore who, along with his nephew Larry, travels to Pahquel, a village in the crosshairs of an environmental showdown. When James dies en route, Larry is left to decide: Should he attempt to escape his own personal demons by immersing himself in a completely foreign culture? Or retreat and resume his disaffected life in the U.S.? What costs will he bear if he chooses to press forward? Against a lush backdrop, the author gives voice to the complexities of social, anthropological and environmental forces. This is a page-turner of an adventure story that rests upon the deep and unsettling layers of undergrowth.

Undergrowth: A Novel

Burke, Nancy

Living in an apartment above the bike shop owned by his embittered father, Tomas Zimmermann keeps company with Grey and Callie, his best friends since childhood. At summer’s end, Tom leaves for Madison where he falls in with an unusual and ultimately destructive crowd. As the book approaches a climax, Grey and Callie reappear with trouble of their own, and Tom is forced to choose between old loyalties and a new sense of belonging.`

Simple Machines: A Novel

Morris,Ian

Colin Tugdale has only one year left to live. He has no complaints. He took the government money, and he lived for twenty years in perfect health, never growing one day older, never getting sick. But his time is almost over, and his beloved wife, Ruby, is already gone. Colin needs something to occupy himself. He meets a woman who should be dead. He sees a man who is dead. Is it possible that his government has been lying to him? Colin’s last year might prove to be his most exciting. Set in a world gently different from ours, this thriller explores the nature of aging in society, within the context of a thriller that places two ordinary people in a race against time that culminates in a remote boundary land.

Conclusion: A Novel

A summer party and a thunderstorm bring relationships into focus, as three women must decide how to move forward in this humorous and dramatic tale of intersecting lives. Eleanor is bored with her two sons and a husband who ignores her when she reconnects with Phil, a man she knew in high school. Phil’s wife is leaving him because of his philandering, most recently with the younger Sarayu. Eleanor’s friend Kaye doesn’t approve of Phil, but she has her own problems: too much drinking and a fraught relationship with her husband and daughter, who are building a boat together. Poignant and acutely observed, “We Have Everything Before Us” is unsparing yet sympathetic as it details the unsettling junction of illusions and reality.

We Have Everything Before Us: A Novel

Spodek, Esther Yin-ling

"Jimmy Dean, clip-on shades and motorcycle boots, walked late onto the set of the General Electric Theater. Cast and crew were there, as was Ronald Reagan, coproducer and actor-host. Jimmy was in character, although not precisely the one he'd signed on to play. He was deep into James Dean, New York stage actor, big screen Technicolor star . . ." It's December 1954. During a live television performance of the General Electric Theater, a young James Dean brandishes a pistol at fellow actor (and weekly show-host) Ronald Reagan. Dean goes off script, and what happens next kicks off a noirish alternate history, a "sliding doors" narrative that takes real events in a different direction. The Cold Last Swim features two cultural icons: one who would be dead within a year, immortalized as a symbol of cool rebellion; the other, in a little over a quarter century, would become leader of the free world, the standard bearer of traditional and even fundamentalist values. Each reflects fifties America: Reagan is firmly established among the open freeways and unblemished skies of sunny Los Angeles; Jimmy, emerging from the black-and-white shadows of a rainy New York street. Told largely from Jimmy's viewpoint, but incorporating a diverse cast of period characters, The Cold Last Swim is classical Greek drama: Reagan's Apollo, god of light, warmth, and temperance; Jimmy's Bacchus, license, alienation, and impulse. In this era between the mid-fifties and mid-sixties, we recognize the seeds are being sown for the cultural gulf that divides America today. Reading group guide available to download from publisher's website.

The Cold Last Swim: A Novel

Burke, Junior

Compelling, bittersweet novel with memorable characters set in the 1960s in rural Pennsylvania, written by the legendary singer/songwriter/performer/author and founding member of the singing group The Roches The Town Crazy, set in the sleepy town of Hanzloo, Pennsylvania, a suburban Catholic community in 1961, is a novel of passion, absurdity, innocence, and sorrow. A single father moves into town with his young son, which arouses suspicion from the husbands and the interest of the wives, but at the same time one of the wives seems to be losing her mind, and no one knows what to do. A contemporary, often humorous take on a bygone era,The Town Crazy also delves into the terror and cruelty of childhood, the dangerous loneliness of failing marriages, sexual repression and desire, and the intersection of art and religion, all culminating in a tragedy for which everyone in the town bears some responsibility. Reading group guide available to download from publisher's website.

The Town Crazy: A Novel

Roche, Suzzy

Product Description 
Someone Should Pay for Your Pain by Franz Nicolay hits the backroads with singer-songwriter Rudy Pauver as he navigates a conflicted relationship with a successful protégé and the unexpected arrival of his spirited young niece.\nIn the doldrums of a career as a cult figure, Rudy has been overshadowed by Ryan Orland, to the point where Rudy is now identified as an imitator of the younger man. Ryan is generous and supportive, but Rudy finds it hard to be grateful, especially as a sordid confrontation results in their estrangement. When his sister’s daughter, a teenage runaway, turns up asking to join him on the road, Rudy has to come to terms with the limits of his ambition and the nature of his obligation to family. 
Someone Should Pay for Your Pain is an exploration of the nature of creativity and popular success; artistic and ethical influence; the pathos of the middle-aged artist; changing standards of sexual morality; and guilt and penance in a post-religious society. 
Reading group guide available to download from publisher's website. 
 Review \n"Starting at the midlife crisis of an early-aughts indie rock never-was, Franz Nicolay delivers a tight-fisted gut punch of a novel, weaving a road-weary world with a lyricist's skill for evocation, emotion, and economy....A knockout fiction debut from a longtime troubadour." — 
Buzzfeed, "42 Great Books To Read This Spring"\n"Remember buying a novel at an actual bookstore & taking it home & starting it, then you can't stop & you're up till 3 a.m. plowing through it? Thanks to the great Franz Nicolay for writing That Novel. A punk rock tale like no other: 
Someone Should Pay For Your Pain"—Rob Sheffield\n"The kindest praise I believe a writer can give another about their work is: I wish I'd written this. About 100 pages into Franz Nicolay's debut novel, 
Someone Should Pay for Your Pain, that thought hit me like a baseball bat. God, even that title fills me with envy....bleak, beautiful, authentic, sweet, and sobering. I can't recommend this book enough for Rockers Of a Certain Age."—Dan Ozzi, 
REPLY ALT\n"Nicolay's pitch-perfect observations make his story intriguing and all too true, zooming by like trees on the side of the highway. If the most specific things are the most relatable, then this carefully orchestrated takedown of musician life and will hit home with anyone who is reckoning with the bleary truths of a self-righteous life, from either side of forty." — 
Razorcake\n"It's wonderful...If you've been in a band or been even loosely tied to a scene, you know these people and these places and these roads and these dive bar floor tiles and these mattresses in the corner at the local flophouse. It's real and it's relatable and it's a sort of book about what happens after the 'coming of age' stuff gets old...a hell of a novel." — 
Dying Scene\n"Nicolay's insight into that world comes across vividly."— 
SPIN\n"Moving, funny, and sometimes brutal...teems with perfect tiny details."— 
New Books Network\n"Punchy and wise...brutally funny and heartfelt."— 
Chronogram\nAbout the Author \nFranz Nicolay is a musician and writer living in New York's Hudson Valley. His first book, 
The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar, was named a "Season's Best Travel Book" by The New York Times 
. Buzzfeed called his second book 
Someone Should Pay for Your Pain a "knockout fiction debut." He teaches at Bard College.

Someone Should Pay for Your Pain: A Novel

Nicolay, Franz

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