New this week
The latest additions to The Library's collection
If you have a complete or in-progress work you’d like added to The Library or an indie-published book to include in the Buy Indie section, follow this guide, and we’ll help spread the word.
And thanks again to everyone for helping us support indie authors!
In the stacks
Contemporary Fiction
Things That Can’t Be Broken | Shannon Haynes | (N) (I) (F)
Things That Can’t Be Broken takes place from 1980 to the present day across four seemingly unrelated lives that are swept up and dispersed in the wake of a child’s violent death, a child some of them never even met. Yet there is hope for healing through human connection and the strength of her promise.
Literary
Who Will Save Her? | Val Stuart | Mystery, Sci-Fi (N) (I) (F)
Milly's journey spans twelve birthdays in the near-future, revealing an intricately layered and interconnected story. Succinct delivery belies subtext, clues and multi-media symbolism. The story sparkles with action and suspense, but is deeply character-driven by her. In a harsh future not hard to imagine, Milly must find what it truly means to be human. When people are traded and subjugated, she walks the line where “have and have-not” means life itself, yet forges on with her dry humor intact. Who can she trust? Who or what is watching her? What’s she thinking? The perspective of the mysterious narrator makes one ponder: does Milly need saving, and which she is her? Can she gain freedom from the pain of her past without becoming the perpetrator herself?
Are you publishing a book, comic, or story/poetry collection on Substack that you’d like to add to The Library? Send it our way!
Buy Indie
Can readers buy your indie book from your author's website or favorite online bookseller? Provide us a link and some details about your book, and we’ll help get the word out!
From the Stacks
Featuring a different, randomly-selected book every week.
Snakes and Ladders and the Destinies of Unborn Universes | Daniel W. Davison | Science Fiction, Magical Realism (N) (I) (F)
It’s New Year’s Day, 1994, on a version of Earth where unborn universes are as common as fireflies and where the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. UCLA senior and former high-school wrestler, Evan, boards a red-eye flight from Sydney, Australia, to Los Angeles, California, and finds himself catapulted into a kaleidoscopic rollercoaster ride unlike anything he’s ever experienced, an odyssey mediated through the ancient Indian board game, Snakes and Ladders—a game Evan started long ago when his childhood friend, Niyati, introduced him to it. Niyati, who has become an astrophysicist in the intervening years, joins Evan on his quest to revise the mistakes of his past in an effort to save both of their futures. Snakes and Ladders and the Destinies of Unborn Universes is a novel combining elements of science-fiction and magical realism to tell a moral fable in the vein of Hermann Hesse (with a dash of Douglas Adams thrown in the mix).