Mary Murphy grows up in a small town in the midst of an economic downturn as the daughter of a reluctant young mother who was impregnated by her alcoholic boyfriend on prom night.

I thought I could’ve saved Karen Carpenter’s life had we been friends. But after slogging through this biography, I can’t imagine being friends with the woman Randy Schmidt depicts.

In this action-packed mystery novel capturing the terror of Nazi rule in 1930s Germany, journalist Hannah Vogel finds herself in dire straits, to say the least.

When Hilary Thayer Hamann self-published Anthropology of an American Girl in 2003, she achieved an inordinate amount of success for any novel, let alone a self-published one. Now Random House is publishing a revised version of the visionary work.

Fresh out of college, Marina follows her girlfriend to rural Shika, Japan, to teach English for a year. But challenges arise as she navigates a host of cultural differences and soon finds that it is difficult to discard anything there. Literally.