Raffaela Marie Rizzo is the author of Thank You For The Shoes: Anniversary Edition

Creative Non-Fiction

Rich historical details throughout. While the story focuses on the life of one man, Michelangelo Rizzo, it is an everyman story of immigrants who came to America. It reads like a novel. Inspired by the author's own family history, which gives it authenticity along with its epic scope, it spans eighty years, two continents, and several U.S. states. The saga opens in 1909 as a thirteen-year-old fatherless boy leaves his hometown of Platania in the mountains of southern Italy on a solo journey to find the grave of the man whose blood runs in his veins, a man he cannot possibly remember. Through flashbacks, we come to understand the history, circumstances, and challenges faced by the boy's father and millions of others who were part of a thirty-year Italian migration to the Americas in the late 1880s and early part of the Twentieth Century. From the port of New York, to the steel mills and coal mines of Pennsylvania; then on to building the Shore Road along Lake Erie in Cleveland, Ohio, and finally arriving in the state where he hopes to find his father's grave and where he settles, Connecticut, This young man's journey is fraught with detours, challenges, loss and tragedy, and enriched with love, joy and a triumph of spirit. Readers will come to love this imperfect, ordinary man, with an extraordinary helping of faith, hope, commitment, and zest for living, merged with a button-busting love for his adopted country. Readers interested in ancestry, cultural identity, and early twentieth-century life will find much to relate to, especially in how the story honors the lives and choices of those who came before.

Raffaela Marie Rizzo - The Independent Author Network

Alexandra Hayne is the author of What Ruth Learned: A Novel

Women's Fiction

A novel of secrets, reinvention, and the stories we inherit.

Ruth Sullivan never expected to return to Los Angeles. But when her life stalls out, she is pulled back to her hometown — and into the mystery of her family’s past. What begins as a quest to remake her own life becomes a journey through forgotten journals, faded photographs, and the shadows of 1950s Hollywood.

In a dual-timeline narrative that spans decades, Ruth uncovers the truth about a woman who called herself C-Note, a priest with a past, and a marriage that unraveled under the weight of ambition and silence. As Ruth pieces together the fragments of lives she never knew, she must confront her own choices, her fractured family, and the legacy she is poised to carry forward.

What Ruth learns does change her life, but not in the way she first imagined.

Alexandra Hayne - The Independent Author Network

Menelaos Gkikas is the author of Rose Garden, A Second Chance

“Nothing is what it seems, and nothing lasts forever.”

This will soon be realized by Nefeli, a young, daydreaming ballerina, when she is called to save a world that she wouldn’t imagine could exist.

From Victorian England, in a magical way, she will be moved to Fairytaland. There, together with prince Stephen, they will try to smooth the disruption of this fantastic-phantasmagoric world, where everything obeys unknown, paradoxical rules.

The universe is not made by atoms, but by many tiny stories, and Nefeli will create many of them beside Stephen.

Is one of them capable of saving the magic of fairytales?

Will the two heroes manage to return Fairytaland to its former, golden age?

An illustrated epic fairytale fantasy novella for all ages above 16 yea

Menelaos Gkikas - The Independent Author Network

Wolf Bahren is the author of The Secessionist's Wife

Espionage/Journalism/Thriller

For journalist Anna Jones of the New York Daily Journal, nothing is more important than finding the truth. So when Fort Riley, Kansas, suffers a terrorist attack, Anna jumps at the chance to see what's happening at the base. She and her partner Viktor Simonson rush to the heartland to cover the events as they unfold. Once on the ground, they agree to divide and conquer-one will check out the damage at the military installation, the other will attend a press conference with Kansas Governor Marie Danielle Schreiber in the nearby college town of Manhattan. In no time, Anna realizes the attack may not be as cut-and-dried as it appears. She also loses track of Viktor.

Meanwhile, on a farm outside Junction City, housewife Theresa Walkermore is grappling with mysteries of her own. Between her husband Noah's unexplained absences and middle-of-the-night activities, she's sure he's being unfaithful to her again. But as she's drawn into his world, she fears he's embroiled in something far worse than adultery.

Sharing the same values and moral strength, Anna and Theresa realize that, together, they may be the only ones capable of stopping a plot that threatens not just Kansas, but the United States itself....

https://www.independentauthornetwork.com/wolf-bahren.html

Kathy McIntosh is the author of ​Murder, Truth or Consequences Style

Mystery/Cozy

In a town called Truth or Consequences, somebody's hiding both.

Madrone Hunter can't catch a break - not even on vacation. A relaxing stay in New Mexico's hot springs town turns chilling the moment her host's neighbor is found dead, right after the two had fought bitterly over a property line.

Police call it suicide. The victim's son calls it murder. When Madrone starts digging, she not only finds motives but a decade of rivalries, betrayals, and a blackmail scheme that someone would kill to keep buried. As the suspect list grows, so does the danger. In a town built on secrets, will the truth cost Madrone everything? 

Kathy McIntosh - The Independent Author Network 

Erik D. Larson is the author of The Kikiloa Chronicles

The Kikiloa Chronicles

Literary Science Fiction (Time Travel)

“An engaging time-travel romp that mashes up Jung and Doctor Who to masterful effect.” OUR VERDICT: ✓ GET IT — Kirkus Reviews

“Moving, surprising time-travel story of the fight against entropy. Rewards patient attention.”  Editor’s Pick — BookLife Reviews by Publishers Weekly

Kikiloa, the puckish and imperfect time-surfing Mother of humanity, takes us on an award-winning kaleidoscopic adventure of hope, loneliness, and self-discovery. Reviewers agree: it's a "wildly original" novel "unlike anything else" they've read — philosophical literary storytelling that "offers a rich and rewarding experience."

Kiki is both the 200,000-year-old Mitochondrial Eve and a freckled fourteen-year-old trickster bounding across a San Francisco park to meet her ordinary friend Hazel, who Kiki believes can make death itself pass people by. Probably.

As she flickers across a trillion universes, Kiki is determined to discover an antidote to entropy before everything meaningful is lost. And she hopes Hazel is the key.

When a cliff collapses beneath them and Kiki vanishes mid-fall, Hazel is left facing the man who attacked them, while Kiki’s braided hopes unravel backward through self-delusion, all the way to her bleak first life as an outcast enslaved in a dystopian prehistoric world.

But Kiki never lets up. She laments a Hawaiian tsunami, alchemizes sniper attacks, tells quantum stories, weaves through highway pileups, goes Jungian, and bakes perfectly average cookies. And through it all, she spars with her infuriating, enigmatic mentor Paha, who believes surfing is elegy: all waves break, and fighting the end only creates suffering.

The Kikiloa Chronicles is Erik D. Larson’s emotionally vast, funny, and wild literary debut carried by Kiki’s unmistakable voice — from the devastating loneliness of her first life to the hard-won wisdom of friendship. Charming and self-deceiving, she wrestles with love, a force like gravity, alive at the core of a universe destined for darkness.

Circe meets Douglas Adams in the spirit of Ursula K. Le Guin. Foreword Clarion 5 out of 5, Literary Titan Gold Book Award, 2× American Fiction Awards Winner.

Read Book One of Kikiloa's trilogy with your eyes, mind, and heart wide-open. 

Erik D. Larson - The Independent Author Network

Mark Grenside is the author of the Marcus Riley Thriller Series

 Sunset Circus

Thriller

Producer Marcus Riley believes dangerous stories belong on screen. That changes when Charlie Foster, a former Hollywood prop buyer now scraping by on Venice Beach, presses a riddle into his hand. Hours later, Charlie is found dead outside Sunset Circus, a pawn shop in Los Angeles.

When the police start asking questions, Marcus realises Charlie's puzzle points to the Miksas, a Nevada crime family who rule on two buried secrets: a fortune in Romanov treasure smuggled out of Russia by Olga Miksa's father, and an act of Cold War betrayal that bought the family's immunity from East and West alike.

With his partner, designer Melinda 'Mako' de Turris, Marcus follows the trail into the Nevada desert, uncovering an assault on Charlie's daughter at The Mighty Bison casino and the theft of an artefact the Miksas must recover, one that ties back to the lost Tobolsk urns and the Eremin Letters, and forward to Stalin's darkest secret. Olga and her daughter Lexi Miksa will do whatever it takes to hold on to power, and the deeper Marcus and Mako dig, the higher the body count climbs. Riley digs into the past, but he could end up digging a grave for himself.

Mark Grenside - The Independent Author Network

Linda Soules is the author of the So You Want To Be A... series

The So You Want To Be A... series, a growing collection of career-exploration books for readers ages 10–14. Now with 50 books!

So You Want To Be A Shark Researcher: A Kids' Guide to Sharks, Marine Science, Ocean Conservation, and the Bold Scientists Who Study the Sea's Top Predators

Children's Nonfiction (Middle Grade)

​​Sharks have been in the ocean for more than 400 million years. We are only now beginning to learn where they go, and the answers are coming from people who spend far more time on data than in the water.

In So You Want To Be A Shark Researcher, readers ages 10–14 learn what studying sharks actually involves: satellite and acoustic tagging, tracking migrations, taking tissue samples, analyzing diet and reproduction, surveying populations, and building the statistical models that turn scattered detections into a picture of a species' life.

Young readers get the real path in — biology, chemistry, statistics, and coding coursework, dive certification, boat handling, volunteer and internship work, undergraduate degrees, and the graduate research where most shark science happens. The book also covers the conservation side, where science meets fishing policy and international agreements.

It profiles working shark scientists and researchers who changed how the animals are understood, and it is candid about the trade-offs: fierce competition for funding, seasonal fieldwork, long stretches at a computer, seasickness, and the difficulty of protecting species that many people still fear.

Linda Soules - The Independent Author Network

Prince Adam's Quest by Terrence W. Walsh is On Sale

 

Prince Adam's Quest by Terrence W. Walsh is now ON SALE for $.99 on Amazon Kindle.

Get your copy by Sunday, August 16.

 

One dragon. One prince. One witness. A Quest that will change them all.

Prince Adam always wins. When destruction and a dragon are reported in the kingdom of Leftovria, Prince Adam sets forth on a Quest to slay the dragon, accompanied by the apprentice bard, Minnow. Their journey takes them over bridges managed by trolls. Trolls love tolls, which Adam struggles to pay. Minnow composes songs as they travel, charming everyone including the king of trolls.

The Quest may have three endings: history, comedy, or tragedy. Adam, by his actions, will get to choose his fate.  

Kindle https://www.amazon.com/dp/b0h4nm2thy

What the Mirrors Knew by Linda Annas Ferguson

Every human journey is one of transition, but Anna Grace O’Neill’s is anything but conventional. Living alone in a bungalow on the riverbank of Charleston, South Carolina, and disenchanted by a less-than-satisfying life, she discovers once-buried revelations in a journal left by her deceased and beloved grandmother, Aine.

The mystery of why her grandfather, Angus, died before he could accompany Aine to America from Ireland after their teenage marriage years ago is one that she is driven to resolve. On her quest, she is called, as if by their spirits themselves, to embark on nothing less than a pilgrimage to the home of their youth. Their native land is part of the equally ethereal and earthborn Irish “Wild West” coast, where myths are a national heritage. Encountering surreal experiences, she is often unsure if she has been “taken astray” to another dimension by the invisible forces maintained in Celtic folklore, where alchemy and the ephemeral aren’t foreign concepts.

She is drawn off course when her path crosses that of an unexpected admirer, Kevin, a quantum physicist turned roving magician, yielding life-shifting events. Her formidable odyssey, as much within as external, creates a conflict in how she maneuvers the rearrangement of her once-mundane world.

Enriched with literary style and sensibilities, the story is interwoven with philosophy, magical realism, spirituality, romance, and alternate realities. Anna Grace’s struggles are the core incentive that keeps us rooting for her and leaves the reader’s hand resting on the back cover, deliberating well past the last line.

https://www.independentauthornetwork.com/linda-annas-ferguson.html