When Joya Fields was a senior at the University of Maryland, she interned for Easter Seals and met many people with disabilities. It was an eye-opening experience that the book-loving English major drew on years later for her first novel, Beneath the Surface, which released this month from The Wild Rose Press.

“The heroine, Brooke, is a below-the-knee amputee. I wanted her to fight injustice to find inner strength. Since this is a romance, of course I wanted her to fall in love, too.”

Let’s start with the answer that everyone wants from Marni Mann: no, she’s not a heroin addict, and she’s never been a heroin addict. But she’s flattered when readers of her debut novel, Memoirs Aren’t Fairytales, ask to see the scars on her arms (there aren’t any of those, either). They assume that only someone who has lived the dark and tumultuous life of addiction would be able to tell the stories that Marni tells.

In fact, it was someone else, someone she describes as “very close to me,” who struggled with addiction, and Marni felt their pain. “I wanted to understand the addict’s side because I couldn’t understand why someone I love would continuously hurt me…. I couldn’t talk about their addiction anymore, so I took a pad of paper and a pen, and… about two hours later, the first chapter was written.”

To call Andy Gavin a “serial creator who doesn’t sleep much” is a bit of an understatement. He co-founded the video game development company Naughty Dog when he was just fifteen, and went on to oversee the creation of more than a dozen video games, including bestselling and award-winning titles like Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter, not to mention that he made some of them while studying for his PhD at MIT.

So when he turned his attention to writing fiction in 2008, his fans knew to expect an ambitious, breath-taking adventure.

Where were you on September 11, 2001?

R.E. (Bob) McDermott was in Singapore when the Twin Towers fell. The increased airport security after that was a constant reminder of the new threats we faced. But Bob was thinking about another area of vulnerability: shipping. 

With the New York Times debut bestseller Still Missing, Chevy Stevens delivered the "not-to-be-missed thriller of the year." Now she returns with Never Knowing, a breathtaking and complex novel about one woman's search to find her birth mother--only to discover the terror and horror in which she was conceived--and that her birth father is still on the loose.

The first Amazon.com reviewer of G.S. Johnston’s novel Consumption described it as “intense,” and called one of the primary characters “Hannibal Lecter in pink angora.”

Greg Johnston was thrilled. “The description was pretty much spot on,” says the author, who lives and writes in Sydney, Australia. “It was very odd to think someone I have no connection to was reading my book. That was a great feeling, inspiring and one I've never had before… A writer needs a reader.”

At first, Allen Ballard thought that he would write a history book about the African American experience in the mid-twentieth century, dissecting chapter-by-chapter the tumultuous journey that his generation made from segregation to full participation in American society. The respected historian and professor had two nonfiction works and two novels already in print, but publishers were not interested in his proposal.

Undeterred, Allen reframed his vision and decided to tell his own remarkable life story. In 2007, while he was home recuperating from hip surgery, he started to rework his content into a memoir stretching from a Philadelphia neighborhood plagued by the Great Depression to a post-Stalinist Soviet farm, where Ballard stayed with Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev.

As Fool’s Republic opens, Simon Wyley floats in a tiny all-white cell. A short-order cook with a genius-level IQ, Wyley has had a steady job for twenty years, paid his taxes, kept to himself. A dedicated husband and father, he’s a model citizen. So why is he being held?

Wyley is accused of committing crimes against the state—the charges are always implied, never specified—and is being held without formal charge, benefit of counsel, or due process of law. He confuses and confounds his interrogators using the only weapons at his disposal, irony and whimsy, to challenge their arrogance and false assumptions. As Wyley’s journey proceeds, we develop a deeper understanding of the complicated man behind the wisecracks and the dark underbelly of the society that has imprisoned him.

After he sold his company, WinterSilks, in 1990, businessman Frank Farwell started to think about writing a book about his experiences. He dictated his journals, notes, and memories into a tape recorder and had them transcribed, which, he says, “resulted in a hell of a mess: 1,500 unorganized pages that overflowed two cardboard file boxes. [It was] such an overwhelming sight that I left the file boxes in my office closet, untouched, for eight years. Every now and then I’d peek inside, only to recoil in horror.”

Fans of crime fiction and stories set in the City of Brotherly Love are sure to enjoy the long-awaited follow-up to Allen Ballard's WHERE I'M BOUND, a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year. Allen's new novel is a gritty, urban, remarkably bighearted crime thriller called CARRIED BY SIX, which tells the story of a black community determined to rid itself of the plague of drug-driven crime and violence, and its leader's struggle to protect his family from the vengeance of a notoriously brutal gang leader who has escaped from prison.