Literary Fiction – Readers Alley

Category: Literary Fiction

Literary Fiction – Harry Harambee’s Kenyan Sundowner by Gerald Everett Jones

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A Novel

Literary Fiction

Date Published: 6/29/2021

Publisher: La Puerta Productions

Intrigue on the white sands of the Indian Ocean. From the award-winning author of Clifford’s Spiral.

A lonely widower from Los Angeles buys a tour package to East Africa on the promise of hookups and parties. What he finds instead are new reasons to live.

Aldo Barbieri, a slick Italian tour operator, convinces Harry to join a group of adventuresome “voluntourists.” In a resort town on the Indian Ocean, Harry doesn’t find the promised excitement with local ladies. But in the supermarket he meets Esther Mwemba, a demure widow who works as a bookkeeper. The attraction is strong and mutual, but Harry gets worried when he finds out that Esther and Aldo have a history. They introduce him to Victor Skebelsky, rumored to be the meanest man in town. Skebelsky has a plan to convert his grand colonial home and residential compound into a rehab center – as a tax dodge. The scheme calls for Harry to head up the charity. He could live like a wealthy diplomat and it won’t cost him a shilling!

Harry has to come to terms with questions at the heart of his character: Is corruption a fact of life everywhere? Is all love transactional?

Harry Harambee’s Kenyan Sundowner is an emotional story of expat intrigue in Africa, reminiscent of The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene and The Constant Gardener by John le Carré.

Praise for Clifford’s Spiral (Independent Press Awards 2020 Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction)

We’ve seen and noted the comparison of this author by other reviewers to literary giants like Roth and Vonnegut. And we can’t disagree. Yet we feel there may be yet another strata for Gerald Everett Jones, who arguably is doing the best work of his career. We predict that he lacks only a mention in the The New York Review of Books or, better yet, Oprah, to become a nationwide best-selling author. Five-plus stars to Clifford’s Spiral, a true literary novel if ever there was one. We say in all seriousness that if you only read one novel this year, this should be it. – Don Sloan, Publishers Daily Reviews

Preacher Finds a Corpse (NYC Big Book Awards 2020 Winner in Mystery, IPA 2020 Distinguished Favorite in Mystery, Eric Hoffer 2020 Finalist in Mystery)

This is literature masquerading as a mystery. Carefully yet powerfully, Gerald Jones creates a small, stunning world in a tiny midwestern town, infusing each character with not just life but wit, charm, and occasionally menace. This is the kind of writing one expects from John Irving or Jane Smiley.

– Marvin J. Wolf, author of the Rabbi Ben Mysteries, including A Scribe Dies in Brooklyn.

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Literary Mystery – As Long as it Takes by EE Sample

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Literary Fiction, Literary Mystery

Published: March 2021

Publisher: Luminare Press

Kincaid planned an idyllic holiday from his life of violence, but that was before he met Jillian.

After ten years and two dozen countries as a “security consultant”, Chance Kincaid craved solitude. The province of Palawan, with its pristine beaches, was the perfect place to relax as a “tourista”. But even in this remote part of the world, kidnapping, murder, and a missing pilot combine to make Kincaid’s trip anything but a holiday. And he soon finds himself involved with terrorists, the local authorities, and a mysterious young woman.

About the Author

EE Sample is an accomplished musician, composer, and author currently living with his wife in Florida. His first novel, The Last Siren, is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and in bookstores around the world.

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Literary LGBTQ – Sailing to Byzantium

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Literary LGBTQ

Date Published: 5/29/21

Publisher: Blue Fortune Enterprises, LLC

Three friends, one life-changing summer.

Vana, the math prodigy with a voice that is 85% Sarah Vaughan, 10% Billie Holiday, and 5% Aretha Franklin and an attitude to match. Desperate to leave her chaotic family and become the independent woman of her imagination, she lands a summer job on an aging Greek cruise ship as a member of the house band.

Marko, who failed his university entrance exams, is on the trail of bouzouki god Markos Vamvakaris, in hopes of claiming his own artistic identity.

Stepan, agronomist, accordionist, occasional mystic, has spent the last ten years hopelessly, secretly in love with his only friend.

Stranded in the surreal microcosm of a cruise ship, the three friends stumble across a series of dark and dissolving frontiers: between love and friendship, memory and forgetfulness, sacrifice and redemption. On this voyage to the heart of an ancient world, can the bonds of a friendship forged in childhood survive the tests of tragedy and self-discovery?

About the Author

Lori Frey Ranner is a New Orleans native and Oxford-trained Byzantinist. For the past twenty years she has taught history, theology, and Classics in various New Orleans institutions. Married and mother to three children, Sailing to Byzantium is her first novel.

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Literary Fiction – A Season in Lights

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A Novel in Three Acts

Literary Fiction

Date Published: April 2021

Publisher: Lucid House Publishing

Passion, ambition and escape, in the colorful artistic underworld off-Broadway.

Cammie, a dancer in her mid-thirties, has just landed her first part in a show since coming to New York City. Yet the tug of familial obligation and the guilt of what she sacrificed to be there weigh down her dancing feet. Her lover, Tom, an older piano player, came to the city as a young man in the 1980s with a story eerily in tune with Cammie’s own. Through their triumphs and failures, both learn the fleeting nature of glory, the sweetness of new love, and how a dream come true isn’t cherished until it passes. The bright lights of the stage intoxicate, while degradation and despair lurk close behind the curtain. Their sagas are marred by two pandemics, AIDS in the 1980s and COVID-19 today, which ravaged the performing arts community, leaving a permanent scar on those who lived through them. The poignant intersection of their stories reveals a love affair unbound by time, reaching across decades through the notes of a piano’s remembered song.

Praise for A Season in Lights

“Possibly one of the most important odes to New York City’s artists and the fragility of life since Rent.” – Nicole Evelina

“A heartfelt and moving love letter to New York City and it’s artistic community.” – Geoffrey Owens

About The Author

Award-winning author Gregory Erich Phillips writes stories with strong characters whose lives, with their many challenges and joys, resonate with a wide audience. Raised in a literary family, Gregory began writing at the age of fourteen. Also an accomplished tango dancer and musician, Gregory has impressed audiences from the West Coast to New York City with his drama and grace on the dance floor.

“Gregory is a force with the written word, a force with his knowledge of the arts and surely a gift to all of us who love these crafts!” – Annie McDonnell

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Literary Short Stories – Jenny on the Street

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And Other Tales of Reverence and Revolution by a Very Young Man

Literary Fiction, Short Stories

Published: January 2021

Publisher: Black Rose Writing

“Dark and twisted a bit like Stephen King,” is how one reader recently described “Jenny on the Street: And Other Tales of Reverence and Revolution by a Very Young Man.”

A desperate young woman lost on the drug-infested streets of London, an insane revolutionary holding the devil in a jar, an indifferent truck driver forced to run over cats and a reverent grandmother looking for God in a rock. All of them are among the unforgettable characters inhabiting these 13 short stories set amidst the magic, majesty, mystery, and mayhem of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a surreal era of extreme idealism, exaggerated exuberance, ferocious fearlessness, and foolish folly. A period in which the scent of change permeated every tree, town, and tent. A time, in other words, much like our own.

Excerpt

THE SUN’S TRUMPETER

Mornings you could see him from the boardwalk. See him, that is, if you happened to be up that early. A tiny, upright silhouette bathed by the endless orange of the sunrise over the sea. You couldn’t tell what he was doing all alone on the beach at that hour. Probably nothing, you’d think. Perhaps he was just walking. It’d make a nice photo; wish I had my camera, you’d think. And then you’d hurry on your way because it had been a wicked all-nighter and you were eager to get home for some much-needed sleep.

But long after you had gone, long after you lay dreaming comfortably in the mahogany bed next to your wife, the sad silhouette remained on the beach. Remained, outlined by the increasingly brilliant sunrise, like a stubborn matchstick in the corner of a fireplace refusing to be consumed by the fire it had kindled.

The first time Sean ever saw the gleaming trumpet, it had been sitting in the window of George’s Loan & Music Co. on King Street. The boy’s eyes had lit up, but he said nothing. Sean seldom did say anything. But it was enough to catch the attention of his grandfather, who stayed finely attuned to virtually any emotion that clawed its way to the surface of the young boy’s face. “Do you like that trumpet?” the old man asked. “Would you like to take it home?” As usual, nothing erupted from the boy’s mouth. But the light in his eyes seemed to flare for an instant, just long enough to spark a decision on his grandfather’s part. “Let’s go in,” he said. “Let’s take a look.” And that was the beginning of Sean’s obsession with the ancient trumpet someone had hawked, and his grandfather had bought.

About The Author

David Haldane, a former Los Angeles Times staff writer, authored the award-winning 2015 memoir “Nazis & Nudists.” In addition to his journalism, essays and short fiction, Haldane has written and produced radio features for which he was awarded a Golden Mike by the Radio & Television News Assn. of Southern California. He currently divides his time– with his wife and two children–between homes in Joshua Tree, California, and Northern Mindanao, Philippines, where he writes a weekly newspaper column called “Expat Eye.”

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Literary Fiction –

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Literary Fiction

Date Published: August 26, 2020 (ebook); September 22, 2020 (print)

Publisher: Propertius Press

Tolan has always let her mother have one secret — how she got that scar on her face — playing along with her mother’s game of inventing outlandish tales to explain the wound away. But when she finds a manuscript on her mother’s computer that promises to reveal the true story, Tolan only hesitates for a moment before curiosity compels her to read on.

She’s hoping for answers, but instead, she finds more mysteries tucked away in her mother’s past. Her mother appears to be associated with Bo, a feisty photojournalist who flies to Cuba in pursuit of a story and becomes embedded with Castro’s rebels, but Tolan can’t quite work out their connection. She’s more clear about the relationship between her mother and Michael, a man twelve years her senior. They bond over their shared outcast status, and their friendship quickly becomes intimate, but the relationship antagonizes the self-appointed moral watchdogs in their small town, who start to convert their threats into action. Tolan is pretty sure that Michael is her father. Her mother told her he died years ago, but the book suggests their story had a different ending.

Almost overnight, everything Tolan thought she knew about herself and her family has changed. She wants answers, but to find them, she risks destroying her closest relationships.

About the Author

Ciahnan Darrell’s short stories and essays have appeared in several journals, most recently in The Columbia Review, and his story, ‘What Remains,’ was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is a contributing editor at Marginalia, an international review of literature along the nexus of history, theology, and religion. He holds an MDiv from the University of Chicago, an MA in philosophy and the arts from Stony Brook University, and an MA and PhD in comparative literature from the University at Buffalo. A Lifetime of Men is his first novel.

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Literary Fiction – No Birds Sing Here

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Literary Fiction

Date Published: March 1, 2021

Publisher: Boutique of Quality Books

In this indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time, two young pseudo-intellectuals, Beckman and Malany, set out on an odyssey to define the artistic life, and in doing so, unleash a barrage of humorous, unintended consequences. NO BIRDS SING HERE is a multi-layered novel about a Post-Modernist America in which characters are struggling to survive in an increasingly chaotic world.

Excerpt

Beckman thought that this would be an excellent metaphor for his first novel, just the thing he had been looking for. Often during that month, the screaming cats got to him. The very first notes would send him raging to the window to fling it open and shout down, “Quiet!” The cats hardly glanced up. It was apparent that they were somewhere outside of his control.

About The Author

A retired Aviation Safety Inspector for the FAA, Daniel V. Meier, Jr. has always had a passion for writing. During his college years, he studied History at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington (UNCW) and American Literature at The University of Maryland Graduate School. In 1980 he published an action/thriller with Leisure Books under the pen name of Vince Daniels.

He also worked for the Washington Business Journal as a journalist and has been a contributing writer/editor for several aviation magazines. In addition to, No Birds Sing Here, he is the author of the award-winning historical novel, The Dung Beetles of Liberia that was released in September 2019 by BQB Publishing.

Dan and his wife live in Owings, Maryland, about twenty miles south of Annapolis and when he’s not writing, they spend their summers sailing on the Chesapeake Bay.

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