Archives par étiquette : The Lark Group

A WINTER’S RIME de Carol Dunbar

A harrowing and emotional novel set in rural Wisconsin—A WINTER’S RIME explores the impact of generational trauma, and one woman’s journey to find peace and healing from the violence of her past.

A WINTER’S RIME
by Carol Dunbar
Forge, September 2023
(via The Lark Group)

Mallory Moe is a twenty-five-year-old veteran Army mechanic, living with her girlfriend, Andrea, and working overnights at a gas station store while figuring out what’s next. Andrea’s off-grid cabin provides a perfect sanctuary for Mallory, a synesthete with a hypersensitivity to sound that can trigger flashbacks from her childhood.
The getaway that’s largely abandoned during the off season starts out idyllic, until Andrea’s once-loving behavior turns controlling and abusive, and Mallory once again finds herself not wanting to go home. After a particularly disturbing altercation, Mallory escapes into the subzero night and stumbles into Shay, a teenage girl, injured and asking for help. But it isn’t long before she realizes that Shay isn’t the only one who needs saving.
A story about sisterhood and second chances, A WINTER’S RIME looks to nature to find what it can teach us about bearing hardship and expanding our capacity to forgive—not just others, but ourselves.

Carol Dunbar is a ghostwriter of over 50 nonfiction titles, and for the last 15 years she has lived in the house that is the setting for The Net Beneath Us. Her essays about living off the grid air on Wisconsin Public Radio and her work has been published or is forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, Midwestern Gothic, The Midwest Review, Literary Mama, Great Lakes Review, and others. In 2018 she won the Hal Prize for fiction and an earlier draft of this novel was a 2013 finalist for the Dana Award.

HARD BODY de Robert James Russell

A graphic narrative of body dysmorphia; a memoir of obsession, shame, and what it means to face the physical space you take up in the world.

HARD BODY:
A Personal History of the Self on Display
by Robert James Russell
Simon & Schuster, 2024
(via The Lark Group)

In the vein of graphic memoirs from Meichi Ng, Alison Bechdel, and Adrian Tomine, HARD BODY by Robert James Russell is a graphic narrative – a blend of comics, memoir, and history – about the author’s experience of male body dysmorphia. From personal stories about how the author’s body has been a commodity for others – while modeling or working at the cult-like Abercrombie & Fitch or teaching – to examining the history and current climate of “get fit” culture, the rise of personal fitness in the early 20th Century (Muscular Christianity, anyone?), and our collective obsession with our appearance throughout history, HARD BODY is a memoir of obsession, shame, and what it means to face the physical space you take up in the world.

Robert James Russell is a wellpublished, former creative writing professor who has taught national workshops for fiction, nonfiction, and graphic narratives across the country. He is the founder of two national literary brands (Midwestern Gothic and CHEAP POP).

ANONYMOUS d’Elizabeth Breck

The note was threatening enough—but its link to two cold cases and a sinister unseen presence sends P.I. Madison Kelly on a frantic search for the truth. Set against a backdrop of surfer culture and coffee houses of San Diego, ANONYMOUS follows a private investigator as she confronts the reality of several girls’ disappearance in a terrifying climax where the hunter becomes the hunted—and Madison is running for her life.

ANONYMOUS
A Madison Kelly Mystery
by Elizabeth Breck
Crooked Lane, November 2020
(via The Lark Group)

Madison Kelly, a San Diego private investigator, arrives home to a note stabbed to her front door: “Stop investigating me, or I will hunt you down and kill you”. The only problem? Madison hasn’t been investigating anyone—she’s been taking time off to figure out what to do with her life. But how does she prove a negative? The only way to remove the threat is to do exactly what « Anonymous », the note writer, is telling her not to do: investigate to see who left it. Could this have something to do with the true crime podcast she’s been tweeting about, and the missing girls?
The girls went missing, two years apart, after a night at the clubs in San Diego’s famed Gaslamp Quarter, and Madison had been probing the internet for clues. She discovers that someone has been one step ahead of her, monitoring her tweets to prevent her from getting too close. Soon Madison’s investigation brings up more questions than answers: are the disappearances connected? Are the girls dead or did they just walk away from their lives? And who is Anonymous, the person who will stop at nothing to keep Madison from learning the truth? As she closes in, so does Anonymous.

Also available:
DOUBLE TAKE (Crooked Lane, October 2021)
A 2022 SUE GRAFTON MEMORIAL AWARD Nominee
When a young journalist goes missing in sunny San Diego , P.I. Madison Kelly learns the true price of knowing too much

Elizabeth Breck is a state of California licensed private investigator. A native Californian, she had read Harriet the Spy twenty times by the time she was nine, so it was no surprise when she grew up to become a PI. She has worked mainly in the field of insurance investigations, making her the real-life version of Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone. In 2013 she went back to school, earning a bachelor’s degree in Writing, summa cum laude, from the University of California San Diego. She writes the Madison Kelly Mystery Series, thrilling mysteries set against the coffee houses and surfer culture of San Diego. The first book in the series, ANONYMOUS, came out to critical acclaim in 2020, and Double Take is being released on October 12, 2021. She lives with a black Labrador named Hubert who is her best friend.

THE NET BENEATH US de Carol Dunbar

In the vein of Delia Owens, Brit Bennett, and Leif Enger, THE NET BENEATH US is a novel about being haunted by the choices we make—and don’t make—in our lives.

THE NET BENEATH US
by Carol Dunbar
Forge, Fall 2022

Silas is dead. Or he’s almost dead, felled by the trees he was felling and now brought home, comatose, to die in his unfinished, off-the-grid house at the edge of the forest he loved. His wife, Elsa, doesn’t know much about living in the country, about running the generator or chopping enough wood to survive the winter. Raising their children here, in this dwelling carved into the side of a hill, had been Silas’s dream, not hers. She doesn’t know how she’ll ease his final days with no heat and no running water. But she knows that he would want to stay here, in his bed, on his land, as his breath shudders to a whisper.
Silas’s aunt and uncle think she’s crazy. Elsa’s father thinks she ought to leave, go find an apartment in the city. Her young children think she’ll be able to bring their daddy back. But Elsa thinks staying is the right choice. She just has to remain focused, learn how to keep the house running, and ignore the way the trees outside seem to call to one another, how the walls seem to come alive at night, how nearly dead Silas seems to be haunting her, already, from his windowless room. Staying is the right choice. Isn’t it?
Told over the course of a year, THE NET BENEATH US is a lyrical exploration of loss, marriage, motherhood, and self-reliance, a tale of how the natural world—without and within us—offers a kind of healing available to us all, if we can learn where to look.

Carol Dunbar is a ghostwriter of over 50 nonfiction titles, and for the last 15 years she has lived in the house that is the setting for THE NET BENEATH US. Her essays about living off the grid air on Wisconsin Public Radio and her work has been published or is forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, Midwestern Gothic, The Midwest Review, Literary Mama, Great Lakes Review, and others. In 2018 she won the Hal Prize for fiction and an earlier draft of this novel was a 2013 finalist for the Dana Award.