Fiction. Was Benjamin L. E. Bonneville, captain of the U.S. Army, granted a two-year leave to try his hand as a fur trader in the Rocky Mountain West? Or did his superiors have ulterior motives, tasking Bonneville to spy on the British in the Pacific Northwest? The Bonneville expedition began in Missouri and made its way to the Oregon country, territory at the time shared through mutual agreement by the U.S. and Great Britain. Yet the British presence there caused grave concerns about the geographic boundaries of our nation. This fictional account of the Bonneville expedition brings to life the difficult trek facing Bonneville and his men in their encounters with Native Americans and their struggles against the harsh elements on their westward journey to Oregon.

West of Green River: a novel of the Bonneville Expedition 1832-1835

Literature & Fiction

Keenan, Jerry

United States

Owl Canyon Press

Fiction. A high school girl nearly drowns during a bicycle "tour for the cure" for breast cancer. A father checks his mentally ill son into the emergency room. A lawyer reexamines his past and present in light of a horrific car crash that killed three high school classmates. These long and short stories all focus upon events which transcend the characters' day-to-day existences, events which move them towards new states of understanding or being, towards new lives which will emerge to take the place of the old.

The Afterlife Road: And Other Stories

Austin, Brice

Short Stories & Anthologies

Fiction. Army sharpshooter and deserter Cooper Chance is trapped. Recruited from Iraq to fight in an African country ravaged by a chronic civil war, Cooper wants nothing more than to go home. Unfortunately, the only thing awaiting him in America is jail, and Cooper is acutely claustrophobic. Whether he likes it or not, he now leads the life of a mercenary, in a gritty world filled with thugs, prostitutes, and corrupt cops. To survive his desperate circumstances, Cooper trades diamonds. One day he wanders into a diamond shop, where he meets Sadiq, a young merchant as lost in the world as he is. As they fall in love, Cooper has no idea Sadiq has ulterior motives. Meanwhile huge oil reserves are discovered nearby, and the CIA offers Cooper a way home without jail time if he agrees to carry out a risky, high-stakes mission. Cooper will do anything to get home--except sell his soul to the devil. But when a teenage prostitute he has promised to save suddenly disappears, Cooper finally relents. Unfortunately, he has no idea that unexpected consequences await.

Cooper's Promise

Timothy Jay Smith

A terrorist threat for Easter Sunday in Jerusalem sets off a chain of events that weave together the lives of an American journalist, Israeli war hero, Palestinian farmer, and Arab-Christian grocer.Alerted to a suicide bomb plot, Major Jakov Levy orders the border with Gaza Strip closed. Unable to get his produce to market, Amin Mousa dumps truckloads of tomatoes in a refugee camp. David Kessler, an American journalist, sees it reported on television and goes to Gaza for Amin's story.Hamas militants plot to smuggle a bomb out in David's car and retrieve it when he returns home, but he's unexpectedly detoured on the way. Meanwhile, a cell member confesses to the plot, and the race is on to find David and retrieve the bomb before the terrorists can.Ultimately A VISION OF ANGELS is a story of reconciliation and hope, but not before events as tragic as a modern passion play change the lives of four families forever.

A Vision of Angels

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. One day during his ninth-grade Speech class Kelly Daniels's outlaw, soul-surfer father appears at school unannounced and pulls the boy from class. Speeding down the freeway, Daniels's father admits that he has been involved in a crime, but he does not remember how it happened. He'd been up for days on cocaine and booze, he explains, and the next thing he knew he woke up in jail with a bad feeling. It was almost a relief when the guard told him he'd killed his cousin Barkley, a drug kingpin of sorts. "I'm sorry to lay this on you," he tells the stunned boy, "but I'm not going to be around to watch your back. Barkley has a son your age...and this kid might come after you someday. You're going to have to learn to look after yourself." A few days later, the father skips bail and flees the country. "Forget about him," everybody says. But the boy doesn't forget. Someday, he believes, they'll find each other, the fugitive father and the dreamy son, and together they'll surf perfect, faraway waves. "Daniels more or less raised himself, as the son of Christian cultists fallen on hard times in the California desert in the 1970s.... [H]e writes about those years of poverty and lost wandering with a nuanced objectivity that is wise as only very good writers can be wise: He draws beauty out of humiliation and fear with the precision and evocative power of his language and the relentlessness of his gaze."—Jaimy Gordon "In [his work] you'll encounter a writer of dynamic prose, of expertly modulated sentences, and pitch perfect, often hilarious dialogue; a writer with a haunting sense of atmosphere, and considerable narrative invention."—Stuart Dybek

Cloudbreak, California

Biographies & Memoirs

Daniels, Kelly

Regional U.S.

Fiction. Eighteen year old Eddie believes finding a girlfriend will solve his loneliness. He has always been shy around girls and, because of his self doubt, he has never dated. He has spent his teenage years in his bedroom by himself, watching TV, listening to music and looking at his baseball cards. But when he meets April and her family everything changes. Eddie's love for April and his desire to break away from his past completely blind him to the serious problems with April and her family. His need to belong prevents Eddie from seeing that April's family has its own deep-rooted psychological problems. Undaunted, Eddie makes up his mind to work harder and harder to make April see that he loves her no matter what, and that nothing she does will change his mind.

The Poor Sucker

DeLong, Kelly

Teen & Young Adult

Three years after the sudden, mysterious death of their 1-year-old daughter Lily, Josef Coleman, a high-strung New York surgeon, and his editor wife Claudia Macinnes remain mired in anguish and grief. Their mourning has left them reaching out for different things in different ways: Josef for a primal, physical connection that Claudia can no longer bear, and Claudia for a connection of the soul that Josef has never really known how to offer. To numb his pain and attempt to fill the gaping hole of loss, Josef turns to a young surgical nurse named Kiera; Claudia, meanwhile, is drawn into what seems like an unrequited fantasy about her psychotherapist, Stuart. The time she spends in his office -- this sole "other room" where she can allow herself to project into the future -- becomes a rare bright spot in her weeks. The couple’s extended families soon become implicated in the unraveling of their lives. Bit by bit, haunting pasts and their impact on the present are revealed, as is the chilling truth about Lily’s death. Interwoven with Claudia’s meticulous journal entries offering glimpses of a sunnier future, the story ultimately takes a surprising turn reaffirming that in tragedy’s wake lie redemption, reckoning and peace.

The Other Room

Triedman, Kim

Contemporary

*Gold medal winner for contemporary fiction - 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards. John Ritter, a frustrated artist, demonstrates that self-destruction can be a form of protest--or maybe just the last resort for those who refuse to grow up. After years of adventure on the West Coast, he returns to Cincinnati to care for his grandmother, who suffers from Alzheimer's, and to protect her farmland from commercial development. Still in love with his ex-girlfriend and his youthful ideals, John lives in denial of the facts that his ex has moved on, that he is ill-equipped to serve as a caretaker, and that his life is in limbo. Unreliable, unstable, but hilarious and brutally honest, John's artistic sensibility and his job as a landscaper make his situation even more maddening. Wearing his wounded heart on his sleeve, he turns his life into a piece of performance art that involves late-night graffiti raids and car theft. He aims to illustrate how the forces of love, freedom and individuality can triumph over greed, conformity and corporatization. In the eyes of those around him his project is a failure, but for the reader it offers a dangerously veering joy ride.

The Heart of It All

Courter, Justin

Literary

A Love story about good bread, good neighbors, and the fickle winds of the mistral. (Recipes included). A chaotic week of mishaps and misunderstandings in Avignon, France. In this light-hearted story of family and love, Madame Reynaud reigns at the helm of her neighborhood. Her daughter Monique, who years ago was maimed by the violent mistral wind, is determined to break free from her mother’s tender, yet stifling care. But Madame Reynaud is quite oblivious to her daughter’s plan—she is preoccupied with planning Monique’s birthday celebration. When Madame Reynaud is tricked into inviting every one of her elderly friends to come to the house on Sunday for the surprise party, she learns that Monique has a surprise of her own. All Madame Reynaud’s problems come crashing down at the annual Fete of the Three Kings, when she finds herself in a compromising situation with the baker, Monsieur Boffard. In the end, the Gypsy Queen from the laundry sets the situation straight, for she sees the future and tells Madame Reynaud what she must do—the solution she really knew all along.

A Garden Wall in Provence

Knowles, Carrie Jane

When they are not studying for physics and math classes, Lucila and her friends Natacha, Anita, Piru and Clarita, meet on weekends to model outfits and conduct photo shoots of their fashion shows. Lucila, one of the few girls with her own computer, painstakingly edits the photos and shares them on Facebook for their classmates. A mysterious message posted on Lucila's Facebook page by a stranger is the prelude to a series of terrifying events: Who, she wonders, is Hunter? As the story of Dangerous Networks unfolds, Lucila's friends begin to disappear under a variety of strange circumstances. Lucila fears something horrible is happening to them. With the help of her classmate Tomi, Lucila begins a desperate search to find out what is going on.
In this debut novel Vik Arrieta addresses urgent social issues: the role of new technologies in the way we communicate and establish relationships, the risks involved in sharing our lives online, and the real threat of stalking and kidnapping. Arrieta was inspired to write the book by the case of Marita VerÓn, a young woman who was kidnapped in San Miguel de TucumÁn, Argentina on April 3, 2002. Marita's mother, Susana Trimarco, received a tip that Marita may have been abducted. After getting little help from the police, Susana tried to track down her daughter, but to date, Marita has never been found. Dangerous Networks exposes a dark world of human trafficking and the potential dangers teenagers face through the misuse of social networks.
With a nimble and thought-provoking style, in prose that reflects the language of today's generation, Dangerous Networks is an action-packed story that will keep readers on the edge of their seats.

Dangerous Networks

Arrieta, Vik

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