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Editorial Content for You Only Call When You're in Trouble

Book

You Only Call When You're in Trouble

Teaser

Warm, funny and deeply moving, YOU ONLY CALL WHEN YOU'RE IN TROUBLE is an unforgettable showcase for Stephen McCauley’s distinctive voice and unique ability to create complex characters that jump off the page and straight into your heart.

Promo

Warm, funny and deeply moving, YOU ONLY CALL WHEN YOU'RE IN TROUBLE is an unforgettable showcase for Stephen McCauley’s distinctive voice and unique ability to create complex characters that jump off the page and straight into your heart.

About the Book

Is it ever okay to stop caring for others and start living for yourself?

After a lifetime of taking care of his impossible but irresistible sister and his cherished niece, Tom is ready to put himself first. An architect specializing in tiny houses, he finally has an opportunity to build his masterpiece --- “his last shot at leaving a footprint on the dying planet.” Assuming, that is, he can stick to his resolution to keep the demands of his needy family at bay.

Naturally, that’s when his phone rings. His niece, Cecily --- the real love of Tom’s life, as his boyfriend reminded him when moving out --- is embroiled in a Title IX investigation at the college where she teaches that threatens her career and relationship. And after decades of lying, his sister wants him to help her tell Cecily the real identity of her father.

Tom does what he’s always done --- answers the call. Thus begins a journey that will change everyone’s life and demonstrate the beauty or dysfunction (or both?) of the ties that bind families together and sometimes strangle them.

Warm, funny and deeply moving, YOU ONLY CALL WHEN YOU'RE IN TROUBLE is an unforgettable showcase for Stephen McCauley’s distinctive voice and unique ability to create complex characters that jump off the page and straight into your heart.

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January 18, 2024

Some of the best book discussions that my group has had is when we come to a meeting “fired up” to talk about a book, whether or not we all liked it. That is what happened this month when we read CLASS: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education by Stephanie Land. A couple of us had read Stephanie's MAID: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive and watched the Netflix series based on it. There was a lot of talk about some of Stephanie’s choices, which spurred a bigger discussion about class in America today. We touched on specific things from the book that had surprised us, as well as what we do as a country for people in Stephanie’s shoes.

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Stephen McCauley, author of You Only Call When You're in Trouble

After a lifetime of taking care of his impossible but irresistible sister and his cherished niece, Tom is ready to put himself first. An architect specializing in tiny houses, he finally has an opportunity to build his masterpiece. Assuming, that is, he can stick to his resolution to keep the demands of his needy family at bay. Naturally, that’s when his phone rings. His niece, Cecily --- the real love of Tom’s life, as his boyfriend reminded him when moving out --- is embroiled in a Title IX investigation at the college where she teaches that threatens her career and relationship. And after decades of lying, his sister wants him to help her tell Cecily the real identity of her father. Tom does what he’s always done --- answers the call. Thus begins a journey that will change everyone’s life.

Read more »

Amy Jo Burns, author of Mercury

It’s 1990, and 17-year-old Marley West is blazing into the river valley town of Mercury, Pennsylvania. A perpetual loner, she seeks a place at someone’s table and a family of her own. The first thing she sees when she arrives in town is three men standing on a rooftop. The Joseph brothers become Marley’s whole world before she can blink. Soon, she is young wife to one, The One Who Got Away to another, and adopted mother to them all. As their own mother fades away and their roofing business crumbles under the weight of their unwieldy father’s inflated ego, Marley steps in to shepherd these unruly men. Years later, an eerie discovery in the church attic causes old wounds to resurface, and suddenly the family’s survival hangs in the balance.

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Jonathan Santlofer, author of The Lost Van Gogh

For years, there have been whispers that, before his death, Van Gogh completed a final self-portrait. Curators and art historians have savored this rumor, hoping it could illuminate some of the troubled artist's many secrets, but even they have to concede that the missing painting is likely lost forever. But when Luke Perrone, artist and great-grandson of the man who stole the Mona Lisa, and Alexis Verde, daughter of a notorious art thief, discover what may be the missing portrait, they are drawn into a most epic art puzzle. When only days later the painting disappears again, they are reunited with INTERPOL agent John Washington Smith in a dangerous and deadly search that will not only expose secrets of the artist's last days but draw them into one of history's darkest eras.

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Christy Lefteri, author of The Book of Fire

In present-day Greece, deep in an ancient forest, lives a family: Irini, a musician, who teaches children to read and play music; her husband, Tasso, who paints pictures of the forest, his greatest muse; and Chara, their young daughter, whose name means joy. On the fateful day that will forever alter the trajectory of their lives, flames chase fleeing birds across the sky. The wildfire that will consume their home, and their lives as they know it, races toward them. Months later, as the village tries to rebuild, Irini stumbles upon the man who started the fire, a land speculator who had intended only a small, controlled burn to clear forestland to build on but instead ignited a catastrophe. He is dying, although the cause is unclear, and in her anger at all he took from them, Irini makes a split-second decision that will haunt her.

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Rachel Hawkins, author of The Heiress

When Ruby McTavish Callahan Woodward Miller Kenmore dies, she’s not only North Carolina’s richest woman, she’s also its most notorious. The victim of a famous kidnapping as a child and a widow four times over, Ruby ruled the tiny town of Tavistock from Ashby House, her family’s estate high in the Blue Ridge Mountains. But in the aftermath of Ruby’s death, her adopted son, Camden, wants little to do with the house or the money --- and even less to do with the surviving McTavishes. Ten years later, his uncle’s death pulls Camden and his wife, Jules, back into the family fold at Ashby House. Its views are just as stunning as ever, its rooms just as elegant, but the legacy of Ruby is inescapable. And as Ashby House tightens its grip on Camden and Jules, questions about the infamous heiress come to light.

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Editorial Content for Before We Were Innocent

Book

Before We Were Innocent

Teaser

BEFORE WE WERE INNOCENT is a compulsive, twisty suspense novel about three best friends’ summer abroad in Greece that ends in murder and what happens 10 years later when history appears to repeat itself.

Promo

BEFORE WE WERE INNOCENT is a compulsive, twisty suspense novel about three best friends’ summer abroad in Greece that ends in murder and what happens 10 years later when history appears to repeat itself.

About the Book

A summer in Greece for three best friends ends in the unthinkable when only two return home.
 
Ten years ago, after a sun-soaked summer spent in Greece, best friends Bess and Joni were cleared of having any involvement in their friend Evangeline’s death. But that didn’t stop the media from ripping apart their teenage lives like vultures.
 
While the girls were never convicted, Joni, ever the opportunist, capitalized on her newfound infamy to become a motivational speaker. Bess, on the other hand, resolved to make her life as small and controlled as possible so she wouldn’t risk losing everything all over again. And it almost worked.
 
Except now Joni needs a favor, and when she turns up at her old friend's doorstep asking for an alibi, Bess has no choice but to say yes. She still owes her. But as the two friends try desperately to shake off their past, they have to face reality.

Can you ever be an innocent woman when everyone wants you to be guilty?

Editorial Content for Half a Cup of Sand and Sky

Book

Half a Cup of Sand and Sky

Teaser

A finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, HALF A CUP OF SAND AND SKY is a moving portrait of one woman’s search for love and belonging cast against a nuanced backdrop of political turmoil.

Promo

A finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, HALF A CUP OF SAND AND SKY is a moving portrait of one woman’s search for love and belonging cast against a nuanced backdrop of political turmoil.

About the Book

A finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, HALF A CUP OF SAND AND SKY is a moving portrait of one woman’s search for love and belonging cast against a nuanced backdrop of political turmoil.

It is 1977, and the anti-shah protests at Tehran University are intensifying, but Amineh is not like her peers who want a say in the future of their country. Her thoughts are on the beautiful literature of another era and her past of rose harvests and Rumi poetry evenings under the desert sky. A chance encounter with Farzad, an opposition leader and disarmament activist, will thrust her into a life she didn’t ask for and didn’t want. Nobody wanted the tyranny that is quickly turning worse than the tyranny it replaced. But maybe Amineh has been looking at her life all wrong. Maybe the thing she is seeking is not in the past at all.