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Some Secrets Only the Sea Can FathomIn the Scottish folktale of the Selkie, a seal woman climbs out of the sea by dark to strip off her outer layers and dance on the shore. Overcome by her beauty, a man hides her skin so she will be forced to stay on land with him. But the Selkie woman is gripped by a powerful longing, spending her days with her face turned towards the sea.In Song of the Selkie, each of the three McFarland sisters follows suit, journeying from her “captive” self  back to her wild more authentic nature. The youngest sister, Frances, has eschewed the life of the body in pursuit of status as a professor in an Ivy League college in America. On the brink of securing tenure, she goes back to Scotland where she is forced to confront a part of herself that has all this time been in a death slumber. By contrast, her sister Lala, the “sexy one,” moves from man to man, in an endless quest for the creative person she always thought she could be. And the oldest sister, Eddie, bides her time among the fishermen she serves in the local pub, drawn by some inexplicable force back to the small island of Roansay from which their dead mother hailed. When the three sisters converge in their childhood home on the pagan festival of Hogmanay, all manner of demons from the past are set to let loose.

What is the sound of story?Voice in writing can seem elusive and hard to define. It’s more than just style it’s rhythm, energy, attitude, and the unique fingerprint of a narrator or character. Voice is shaped by culture and history as much as the mechanics of language. In The Sound of Story, author and writing teacher Jordan Rosenfeld demystifies voice and its close companion, tone, offering writers the tools to develop and refine their own. Through contemporary examples, this book explores how syntax, point of view, emotion and more shape voice on the page.Whether you’re crafting fiction or nonfiction, this book will help you shape and refine voice to create compelling, authentic narratives. The Sound of Story empowers writers to wield voice and tone with purpose, increasing their chances of publication, and delivering a compelling story that leaps off every page.Sibylline Press is proud to announce its new imprint, Sibyl Writing Craft, dedicated to providing definitive titles on writing craft and the book business for writers.

You’ve got a great story, but do you have great sentences?Stylish sentences have their own powerful energy that mesmerizes and even rearranges a reader’s world. Think of this book as a private lesson with Nina Schuyler — award winning author and professor of creative writing — featuring guest appearances by the masters, including James Baldwin, Grace Paley, Anne Carson, Justin Torres, and Toni Morrison. They’ve arrived to show you the mechanics of their magic. Featuring 31 essays and over 100 writing prompts, How to Write Stunning Sentences is the best way to practice writing sentences with style. The second edition of this indispensable guide includes seven new essays and more prompts.Sibylline Press is proud to announce its new imprint, Sibyl Writing Craft, dedicated to providing definitive titles on writing craft and the book business for writers.

Charlotte Salomon Paints Her LifeInspired by the life and work of Charlotte Salomon, this novel shows an artist intent on pursuing her art against all odds. As a young German-Jewish art student at The Berlin Art Academy during Hitler’s rise to power in 1938, Charlotte’s first place prize is denied because she is a Jew, her enrollment annulled. After Kristallnacht, she is sent from Berlin into exile with her grandparents.When Charlotte’s grandmother leaps to her death, her Old World grandfather shocks her with the family secret, a legacy of female suicides. She struggles against her grandfather’s insistence that suicide, not art, is her destiny too.Haunted by the encroaching terror of the Third Reich and the threat of psychological disintegration, Charlotte clings to her determination to become a serious modernist painter, to complete her monumental work “Life? Or Theater?” and get it into safekeeping in a race against time before capture by the Nazis.

Until she finally got sober, Maeve’s life was mired in depression and unconscious struggle.She felt unconnected and full of self-loathing. Not herself. It took a lifetime in and out of AA and rehab and a trail of failed relationships and escalating trouble, before she began to understand the source of her lifelong despair and took the bold step to become the woman she is now.In this intimate and unflinchingly honest memoir, Maeve tells the story of being herself in all aspects of her life, including work, the last threshold. She faced the special challenge of working as a manager of public relations for Goldman Sachs and therefore was a public face of the company. She knew she couldn’t transition quietly.Initially she keeps her identity a secret with wardrobe changes in the lobby bathroom after work. When she finally declares herself, Goldman Sachs – to her surprise – embraces her. A New York Times story follows, leading Maeve to a new life as a role model for other transgender people and giving her a sense of purpose that had been lacking her entire life.

Based on her research into her grandfather’s past as an adopted child, Julia Park Tracey has created a mesmerizing work of historical fiction illuminating the darkest side of the Orphan Train.In 1859, women have few rights, even to their own children. When her husband dies and her children become wards of a predator, Martha – bereaved and scared – flees their beloved country home taking the children with her to the squalor of New York City. But as a naïve woman alone, preyed on by male employers, she soon finds herself nearly destitute. The Home for the Friendless offers free food, clothing, and schooling to New York’s street kids and Martha secures a place temporarily for her children there. When she returns for them, she discovers that the Society has indentured her two eldest out to work via the Orphan Train, and has placed her two youngest for adoption. The Society refusing to help and with the Civil War erupting around her, Martha sets out to reclaim each of them.

When the natural world and the build world collide, the earth needs a good building inspector…In this first case in the new Hugo Sandoval Eco-Mystery series, an old-school San Francisco building inspector must reluctantly venture outside his beloved city and find his sea legs before he can solve the mystery of how a 90-ton blue whale became stranded, twice, in a remote inlet off the North Coast.Set on the turbulent Mendocino Coast against the backdrop of a failing fishing fleet and illegal cannabis grows, Sandoval encounters roadblocks and lies as he grapples with the connection between a red tag posted on the historic Chicken Cove ranch and the decomposing marine mammal at the foot of its cliffs.Debilitated by more than a few idiosyncrasies, reluctant media darling Hugo Sandoval is a people’s hero, fighting the good fight in a modern era where development and climate change butt heads – and where each requested permit attempts to eclipse the old San Francisco Sandoval loves.

One woman’s story, every woman’s nightmareDonna Marie Hayes had a fortitude and smarts. She already survived so much. In this gripping memoir, Hayes recounts the story of her impoverished Jamaican childhood and eventual immigration to the United States at 14. She weathers hardships, including a strict church upbringing, family abandonment, and marriages fused with domestic violence. Then she breaks free as a single mother.Decades later, Donna is educated and at the top of her game in New York City. Her career is soaring on Wall Street and she is starring in her own one-woman show off Broadway. Yet at the peak of her triumph, she is scammed and robbed of her life’s savings by the “love of her life” who she meets on an online dating site. The mastermind was not the usual faceless online fraudster, hiding behind a computer screen in a faraway land; rather, he slept beside her for a year and a half, pretending to be the love of her life.This is the story of how that woman rose yet again to find her power, making the scam and her choice of such a man the last run along the broken roads of her past.

A gripping memoir that shows what freedom looks like when we choose to examine the uncomfortable pastJane is to the world a charismatic personality – opinionated, an inner-city teacher and public activist, a lover of Italy, proud and successful – who thrives on a carefully crafted life narrative. Susannah, her beautiful only daughter and her intended protégé, senses the stricter, darker truth, and fights to resist the control imposed on her by her mother’s narcissistic tale, especially as Susannah becomes a mother herself.But then Jane at 75, healthy and fit, chooses suicide, leaving her daughter with grief and the unwelcome gift of 45 years of hidden diaries. Daring to “read” Jane after her death is like unlatching Pandora’s Box. For a year, Susannah twists and turns to the truths she uncovers, comparing what she remembers with what her mother put down in words. As Susannah Kennedy re-lives her life through her mother’s eyes, she grapples with the ties between mothers and daughters and the choices parents make.

Family Secrets. A genealogical quest takes Van back 100 years to the Iowa prairie in search of an ancestor no one has claimed.As Van Reinhardt clears out her father’s belongings, she comes across a request penned by her father prior to his death. Examining the family portrait of her German immigrant ancestors that he has left her, Van’s curiosity grows about one of the children portrayed there.Meanwhile in the 1870s, Kate is a German immigrant newly arrived in America with only her brother as family. When she and her brother split, she eventually finds her way back to him, but with a secret.Van revisits the town and the farm of her ancestors to discover calamitous events in probate records, farm auction lists, asylum records and lurid obituaries, hinting at a history far more complex and tumultuous than she had expected. But the mystery remains, until she changes upon a small book – sized for a pocket – that holds Tante Kate’s secret and provides the missing piece.

“I am no witch, nor adulteress, thief, nor murderer. They say I have lost my reason, but I know only that my heart is shattered, and in crying it aloud, now I must pay the cost….” After three grievous losses, Puritan woman Silence Marsh dares to question God aloud in the church, and that blasphemy lands her in trouble—she is silenced for a year by the powers that be. Broken in heart and spirit, Silence learns to mime and sign, but it isn’t until a new Boston doctor, the dashing Daniel Greenleaf, comes to her backward Cape Cod village that she begins to hope again. Rather than treating Silence with bleeding or leeches, Dr. Greenleaf prescribes fresh air, St. John’s Wort, long walks—and reading. Silence has half a hope of getting through her year of punishment when the cry of witchcraft poisons the village. Colonial Massachusetts is still reeling from the Salem Witch Trials just 20 years before. Now, after demanding her silence, she is called to witness at a witchcraft trial—or be accused herself. A whiff of sulfur and witchcraft shadows this literary Puritan tale of loss and redemption, based on the author's own ancestor, her seventh great-grandmother.

A witty and fresh reimagining of the paths of Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty long after their storybook endings. Princesses Neve, Della, and Bry are sisters-in-law, having married into the royal Charming family, and for the last thirty-plus years, they’ve been living a coveted happily-ever-after life in the idyllic kingdom of Foreverness.  But royal life isn’t what it seems. Bry’s people-pleasing is exhausting her, Della’s exquisite and renowned beauty is fading with time, and Neve dreads the prospect of becoming queen one day, because power makes one a target, and she doesn’t want to be killed ... again. Then the king’s sudden death thrusts each princess into a personal quest that shows her the truth behind the kingdom’s “perfection” and challenges her sense of purpose. Will each of the royal women take her rightful place, build her new legend, and create her own new happily-ever-after, in midlife? And will the kingdom of Foreverness survive the drastic changes?

WARREN BEATTY WALKS THROUGH THE DOOR...In this offbeat memoir, Nikki Nash tells the story of an obsession that starts with a young girl’s movie-star fantasy. At fourteen, longing for excitement and something of her own, Nikki fixates on superstar Warren Beatty. She’s determined to find him and have him in her life forever. She creates a solid plan that she initiates four years later at the age of eighteen when she gets a job as a restaurant hostess where Beatty frequents. A year later, on a warm Sunday evening in April, after breaking a finger in a judo class and looking her worst—dirty hair pulled back, no make-up, broken finger in a glass of ice—Warren Beatty walks through the door and her plan comes to fruition. In this entertaining and genuine account of the inner workings of Hollywood, Nash pursues a vibrant career as a TV associate director, comic, writer, and actress. Her celebrity-infused journey is also a dance with drugs, religion, Hollywood culture, and other volatile mysteries in the city of angels, including her own metamorphosis.

SOMETIMES, LIFE DOESN’T FOLLOW A LESSON PLAN...After being attacked by a disgruntled parent in the parking lot of the private San Francisco Bay Area high school where she has taught English for the past twelve years, traumatized Chelsea Garden flees to her hometown of Imperial Flats in the Northern California foothills. When Chelsea meets beleaguered principal of Imperial Flats High School, Nora Delgado, the two realize they might have found each other at an essential crossroads. To complicate matters, her former classmate and messy first love, Evan Dawkins, has also recently joined the faculty at IFHS to teach music. And he wasn’t expecting Chelsea to walk back into his life. Other People’s Kids follows three educators: one at the beginning of his career, one in the middle of hers, and one on her way out.A story about teaching, hometowns, and risking change in midlife.

A gritty story of a woman learning to survive in 20th century Gangland New YorkIn early 20th-century Sicily, noblewoman Mimi Inglese, a talented painter, dreams of escaping the rigid expectations of her class by gaining admission to the Palermo Art Academy. But when she contracts tuberculosis, her ambitions are shattered. With the Sicilian nobility in decline, she and her family leave for New York City in search of a fresh start.Instead of opportunity, Mimi is pulled into the dark underbelly of city life and her father’s money laundering scheme. When he is sent to prison, desperation forces her to put her artistic talent to a new use—counterfeiting $5 bills to keep her family from starvation and, perhaps, to one day reclaim her dream of painting. But as Gangland violence escalates and tragedy strikes, Mimi must summon the courage to flee before she is trapped forever in a life she never wanted.

In the small coastal town of Sparrow, Maine, tradition runs deep—and change is rarely welcomeWhen Reverend Miranda McCurdy becomes the new parish priest at St. Gabriel-by-the Sea, she’s determined to make a difference in her small community. But her eagerness to make the church more progressive stirs up a hornet’s nest with members of the Thanksgiving committee who don’t want to give up their long tradition of dressing like “Pilgrims and Indians,” and when a young, pregnant, Honduran woman seeks sanctuary at St. Gabe’s, the congregation’s response is not what she’d hoped. Juggling the demands of her congregation with her own solitude as a young widow, it’s hard to know if her calling to serve the church was real. When she’s faced with a vote of no confidence, followed by an offer from her former employer to head up a new upscale restaurant in Seattle, she has an easy way out, but can she walk away? A lost dog and a handsome stranger only complicate matters.

A long-buried secret. A friendship on the brink. A family forever changed.New York City, 1964. Joan Cavanaugh—a young wife and mother yearning for more falls into a passionate affair with Peter “Hutch” Hutchinson. When the affair ends, she returns to her marriage, raising three daughters with her devoted husband, Graham. For nearly three decades, she keeps her secret locked away, taking the truth of her daughter Anne’s paternity to her grave when she succumbs to cancer in 1989.Portland, 2014. Carolyn Cavanaugh and Julia Hutchinson are next door neighbors and the closest of friends. But when Carolyn’s father, Graham, visits for Thanksgiving, his path collides with Julia’s parents, Hutch and Alice. The revelation that unfolds following Graham’s trip upends both families, bringing a truth to light that will shake two families to their core.As decades of deception unravel, bonds are tested, loyalties waver, and the meaning of family is forever redefined.

How far would you go to find your true home? ​Lucy—single, childless, in her thirties—studies insects and ecosystems, in part to make sense of human behavior. ​That hard-won insight is shattered when her mother dies prematurely, her sister claims the California family home, and Lucy learns that her biological father is apparently a Costa Rican they knew when the family spent summers in the coastal village of Palmita. ​Reeling, Lucy heads south in search of this phantom father.​ But he is nowhere to be found, and none of the locals seem to remember her. The dreamy, off-grid paradise she recalls from childhood has become a hard-edged town leery of outsiders. ​You Could be Happy Here is a story of identity, belonging, and of opening your heart to a deeper understanding of kinship and home.

FINDING A PLACE IN THE NATURAL WORLD AS A HUNTRESSAfter thirty years cultivating fruits and vegetables, raising children, and teaching literature, Deborah Lee Luskin stepped out of her garden and into the forest. At sixty, it was time to age fiercely, overcome her suburban fear of getting lost in the woods and her urban reliance on street signs to know where she was. She wanted to forge her own path through the forest by following the deer. A dedicated locavore, Luskin didn’t want just to read the landscape, she also wanted to eat it.Luskin overcame her ambivalence about guns as she gained a deeper understanding of the hunter’s role in the ecosystem of the northern forest. Her literary acumen helped her read the landscape and—as thoughtfully as she hunts for words—to hunt for deer. With the stories of Artemis, goddess of the hunt, childbirth, and wild nature to inspire her, Deborah became a deer hunter. Reviving Artemis is her story of finding her place in the natural world.