The close of 2020 saw some fabulous new releases from authors I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Check out these offerings that are sure to be your next great read.
In Things Unseen | Gar Anthony Haywood
Dec. 18, 2020 / Slant / 272 pp. / $25 ISBN9781725280007
Diane Edwards has spent the last eight months praying for a miracle after losing her son Adrian in a freak car accident at Seattle’s Lakeridge Park. When she finds Adrian back in his bed one night—alive and well and oblivious to his death—it appears her prayers have been answered.
But this isn’t the kind of miracle Diane was expecting, because she soon learns Adrian is not the only one who’s forgotten that fateful day in Lakeridge Park. The entire world has no memory of it, with the exception of Diane and three other people: Michael Edwards—Diane’s estranged husband and Adrian’s father; Laura Carrillo—Adrian’s teacher, who loved him almost as much as his parents did; and Milton Weisman—the agnostic, sixty-eight-year-old widower and alcoholic who lost control of the car that killed Adrian in Lakeridge Park.
Over the next six days, these four people must struggle to understand what Adrian’s return to the living means, and why God Himself would choose them, and them alone, to play witness to it. In the end, all will learn that God’s mercy knows no limits—but its permanence comes at a price.
Gar Anthony Haywood is the Shamus and Anthony award-winning author of twelve crime novels and numerous short stories. He has written six mysteries featuring African-American private investigator Aaron Gunner. Haywood has written for both The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, and for such television shows as “New York Undercover” and “The District.”
French Dive | Eric Freeze
Nov. 23, 2020 / Slant / 286 pp. / $20 ISBN9781725266148
In the fall of 2014, educators Eric and Rixa Freeze moved with their young family to Old Nice, a medieval town-within-a-city on the famed Côte d’Azur. They’d bought a 700-square-foot dive, an apartment in need of renovation just a couple blocks from the Mediterranean. Their plan: to live differently. No home in the suburbs with a two-car garage, no bedroom for every child, no 24-hour Walmart.
French Dive chronicles the Freeze family’s integration into a culture where large families aren’t all treated alike. What they find—spearfishing for food, renting their car to strangers, fixing and selling old furniture from the garbage depot—is that a city gives back the more you give to it.
Morally complex and unflinching in its analysis of contemporary life and the things that keep human beings apart, Freeze tackles racism, homelessness, art, reality TV, social media, and parenting with wit and humor. Along the way he and his family learn what it means to be a neighbor, a member of a community, and a global citizen, how to treat others with empathy and understanding as they try to carve out a place in this world.
Eric Freeze is author of Dominant Traits, a collection of short stories set in southern Alberta where he is originally from. Eric Freeze’s stories, creative nonfiction, and translations have been published in numerous periodicals including Boston Review, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, New Ohio Review, Tampa Review, and Prairie Fire.
Coyote Fork | James Wilson
UK Release: Nov. 5, 2020 / Slant / 264 pp. / $25 ISBN9781725253780
A timely, stylishly written, and brilliantly conceived metaphysical thriller, Coyote Fork carries us on an unforgettable journey, before bringing us face to face with the darkness at the heart of Silicon Valley itself.
When British journalist Robert Lovelace travels to California to report on the social media giant Global Village, he’s horrified by what he finds: a company—guided by the ruthless vision of its founder, Evan Bone—that seems to be making journalism itself redundant.
Soon Lovelace finds himself embarked on an increasingly fraught and dangerous mission. The aim: to uncover the murky truth about Evan Bone’s past and his pathological disregard for the human cost of the behemoth he has created.
James Wilson is a London-based writer. His previous novels include The Dark Clue, The Bastard Boy, The Woman in the Picture, Consolation, and The Summer of Broken Stories. He has written BBC TV and radio documentaries, and is the author of a work of narrative non-fiction, The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America, which won a Myers Outstanding Book Award.
Sallie Vandagrift 