Aurora Taylor has never had so much to lose.
END OF AUGUST
by Paige Dinneny
Alcove Press, February 2025
It’s almost summer in 1979, and 15-year-old Aurora Taylor is a week shy of finishing her first full year at the same school. She’s desperate to see it through, because every end to her single mother’s chaotic romantic relationships results in a disruptive and sudden move. So many moves that Aurora needs more than two hands to count all the towns she’s lived in and the friendships she never got a chance to make.
So when her mother Laine shows up at school with the car loaded, Aurora thinks her latest fling finally put a nail in this town’s coffin. Instead, it’s her grandpa Jay’s death calling them back to the town Laine’s been running from since Aurora’s conception, when Laine was just fifteen and Aurora’s Gran was the town drunk.
Between her mother and Gran’s explosive relationship, and the whiskey Gran’s returned to to drown her sorrows, Aurora gives their visit to the little blue house in Monroe, Illinois a week, tops. But when Laine begins an intense affair with the married mailman, everything changes. For the first time in her 15 years, Aurora has time to fall in love too—but this time with the town. It’s not unlike most of the small towns in Indiana Aurora has lived in, suffocating summer heat included, but this one has streets and people and places she is given a chance to know and love. It has a girl Aurora can call her best friend. A Gran who loves Aurora even as she fights for control over her own worst nature for the third time in her life. And a picture-perfect pastor’s son who sees Aurora as more than “Laine’s daughter.” It’s everything Aurora never thought she would have to lose. It’s everything she would never let herself dream about.
But each time the illicit lovebirds slip into the back bedroom, Aurora sees her chances at happiness slipping away. Laine won’t just burn a bridge this time, she’ll light the town on fire, burning Gran’s hope, Aurora’s future, and her own chance at redemption to the ground with it.
Paige Dinneny earned her MFA from Cal State Long Beach and writes primarily about the relationships between mothers and daughters. She was born and raised in Southern California, but now resides in Franklin, Tennessee with her sister and two cats. She briefly taught academically, but much prefers interacting with people as a retail store manager.
1770. Delphine lives in the shadows of London: a secret, vibrant world of smugglers, courtesans and small rebellions. Four years ago, she escaped enslavement at great personal cost. Now, she must help her brother Vincent do the same.
It is an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957. Katheen, a college tennis champion turned Delaware housewife, decides not to join her flagrantly handsome life insurance salesman husband, Virgil, or their two young boys, at church. Instead, she takes a dip in the kidney-shaped swimming pool of their apartment complex. And then she won’t come out.
Book 1: GLÄNZENDE ZEITEN
Book 2: GROSSE HOFFNUNG
Paula grew up in Minsk, was sent to New York when she was young, dreamt of studying medicine and was a committed anarchist. But then she met her future husband, the founder of the state of Israel, David Ben-Gurion – and at the end of her life, she finds herself in a kibbutz in the Negev Desert. Her husband is expecting the arrival of his friend, Konrad Adenauer, who has just resigned as German Chancellor. Once again, it is down to Paula to organise the visit and arrange everything. Poverty, war, motherhood, and – again and again – loneliness: this novel is a memorial to a strong, courageous woman, who had to make many compromises in life, and became the First Lady of a country in which she did not believe. And who, even in old age, never stops doubting, searching and hoping.