Reading Skywards – Your Friendly Bookshelf

John of John: a Novel by Douglas Stuart
FICTION

Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the island of Harris to find that little has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal begrudgingly resumes his old life, stuck between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for several decades. Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As lambing season turns to shearing season, everything seems poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly knotted. 

Dissection of a Murder: a Novel
THRILLER FICTION

Nothing is as it seems—and no one is telling the truth—in this page-turning thriller about a young lawyer forced to defend a man on trial for murder against the mentor who taught her everything: her husband.

Homebound: a Novel by Portia Elan
SCIENCE FICTION

Five interlocking lives. One beloved story. A dazzling adventure across centuries and continents in search of the things that hold us together.

A novel about our deep interconnectedness, Homebound is a clear-eyed, hopeful adventure into humanity’s future and capacity for love.

The Girl with a Thousand Faces by Sunny Dean
FANTASY FICTION

When Mercy Chan washed up on the shores of Hong Kong with no family, no money, and no memories, she was thrust into the horrors of World War II. She only survived by hiding in Kowloon Walled City, an infamous, ghost-infested slum full of lost and traumatized civilians. Since the end of the war, she has rebuilt her life and found work with the local triad as a ghost-talker, dealing with the angry and bitter spirits who haunt this place. These days, the filthy gutters and cramped alleyways of Kowloon feel like home.

This Dark Night Emily Bronte, a Life by Deborah Lutz
NONFICTION

From her menagerie of dogs and birds to the beloved moors that Brontë wandered and later emblazoned in her novel, Lutz depicts the passions of an author at odds with convention. Uniting the domestic and the cosmic, This Dark Night plumbs the life and writing of this idiosyncratic woman, dark soul, and monumental genius.