Alice by Gary Gautier

Alice’s world is a dreamlike forest filled with magical characters – the rain king, the mapmaker, the kleptomaniac. But it cannot last. Alice is pulled away to another world where she begins to connect the dots of her own world’s missing history. Sharp, poignant, unforgettable, a post-apocalyptic adult hippie fairy tale by a two-time Faulker-Wisdom prize finalist. Free Dec. 11-15; otherwise, $3.98.

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Fallout of War: Ukraine Year Two by H. Peter Alesso

Fallout of War: Ukraine: Year Two Kindle Edition
by H. Peter Alesso (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
Book 2 of 3: Fallout of War
The desperate fight for survival has given way to something harder: a grinding war of attrition where victory is measured in meters, and the question is no longer whether Ukraine will fall but whether the West will lose patience first.

Lieutenant Commander James Fairbanks has earned his place among Ukrainian special forces. His drone operations reshape battles and bloody Russian logistics across the front. But when Pentagon doctrine clashes with battlefield reality during the summer offensive, James must choose between the approaches that save lives and the orders that satisfy Washington.

In Brussels and Kyiv, Lucy Fairbanks coordinates billions in Western aid while navigating diplomats who hesitate and allies who waver. When a Russian missile orphans a four-year-old girl, Lucy becomes the only family Maria has left—adding an impossible personal burden to her impossible professional one.

Then a journalist who has cultivated them both is exposed as Russian intelligence. The Fairbanks marriage, already strained by separation and secrets, must survive a betrayal neither saw coming.

From the ruins of Bakhmut to strikes deep into Crimea, Fallout of War: Ukraine — Year Two delivers tactical realism, high-stakes diplomacy, and the intimate cost of a war that demands everything from those who fight it.

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Death of a Cigarette: A Story of Survival, Memory and Legacy. by Timothy Webber

Death of a Cigarette opens in the present day, at a Midwestern museum where an artifact rests behind glass: a single unlit Lucky Strike cigarette. From there, Chance, the cigarette himself, begins to speak.

He takes us back to the tobacco fields, tended by sisters Eva Mae and Ella Mae, where the journey truly begins. From curing barns to the factory floor, Chance and his siblings are shaped, wrapped by Henri the dignified French paper, and packed for war. By Chapter 4, their voices awaken fully.

The pack crosses the Atlantic into the hands of Philip Martin, a Missouri farm boy preparing for D-Day. On the Channel, tracer arcs stitch the sky. At Omaha Beach, the ramp drops, Sally burns bright, Winston steadies Philip with an unlit benediction, and Chance, riding in Philip’s chest pocket, becomes a quiet talisman of survival.

Inches and breaths define the beach crossing. Afterward, the war opens into hedgerows and aftermath: a harmonica at dusk, a shared apple, unsent letters. When the fighting ends, silence follows Philip home to Missouri, lingering in a drawer only carefully opened.

In 1961, during the Stars and Stripes centennial in Bloomfield, he gives his uniform, and Chance, to the museum, where a modest placard tells almost nothing of their story.

Decades later, in the Epilogue, Philip’s grandson Art encounters the display once more in the present day. Recognition bridges private grief and public memory, completing the circle that began in the Prologue. Chance remains unlit, but not unspent.

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The Quarry Bank Runaways by G J Griffiths

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“Child apprentices in very many cotton mills continued to be treated like slaves well after the Slave Trade Acts of the 19th century.” “Pauper child apprentices from workhouses were not even paid after working 12 hour days and for 5 or 6 days a week, mill owners counted the profit!” In the early 19th century, when it was the policy of many of the poorhouses and workhouses to deter paupers from applying by making the conditions inside harsh and unpleasant, two boys set out on a journey to Hackney Workhouse in London. Their starting point was in the pleasant Cheshire countryside, where they were apprenticed to the cotton mill built by Samuel Greg in 1784. Children as young as 9 would be employed there, as scavengers, piecers, mule doffers or can tenters. These jobs could be just as unpleasant and difficult for a poor child as those we may have heard of, such as chimney sweeps and match girls. Quarry Bank Mill was some 200 miles north of London and the boys had to sneak out unnoticed and then attempt to walk all the way. It was likely that these enterprising travellers took advantage of the drovers’ roads and the newly developed “motorways” of the times – the canals. Perhaps they were lucky enough some days to hitch a lift; their general direction of travel taking them to Beartown, the Potteries, Dunstable Downs and eventually to London. Whatever challenges they encountered along the way archive evidence shows that they made it. Runaway apprentices had become a problem for society during the years of the Industrial Revolution – so what had prompted Thomas and Joseph to do such a hazardous thing? What happened to them on their long journey? Did they receive any help? Or were they chased relentlessly wherever they ran, since what they were doing was illegal in the eyes of the authorities? This is the story of their adventure and it concludes with the events in the Middlesex courthouse, known then as the Old Sessions.

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A Woman’s Fight by Sofia Diana Gabel

In this blending of historical fact and fiction, 19th century French feminist writer and speaker Maria Deraismes struggles against misogynistic men and the French government during the turbulent 1870s in Paris. Maria involves herself with the Paris Commune in 1871 and rallies behind the new socialist government believing it will end inequality. Violence erupts when troops break through the barricades on April 2nd and begin a bloody week to overthrow the Commune.

Maria fights for equality and speaks openly for the people, but her words fall on deaf ears. With support from her Masonic friends, she pushes to be initiated into the male-only Order to prove women are no different than men and deserve to stand with them. It’s a dangerous road she walks down but she refuses to give up, clinging to the French motto of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

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