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When Rollie Birch returns home from the Great War in 1919 with a cluster of medals, he feels as if he’s landed in the wrong country. His wife has died, leaving behind an infant daughter born while he was overseas. His small logging town of Lumberton, Washington, has grown but still runs on gossip. Almost overnight, Rollie the hero becomes a pariah for his scandalous decision to raise his daughter by himself—a child rumored not to be his—and for refusing to talk about his wartime exploits.

The past two years have changed Kay Sorensen as well. Daughter of the Lumberton timber baron, Kay spent the war working for her father, organizing patriotic and charitable efforts, and discovering her love for politics and business. But when her husband—Rollie’s former platoon commander—returns, Kay expects, correctly, that he’ll make her quit her job. She’s dreamed of marriage as an equal partnership; now, she chafes under her husband’s cold tyranny. Did the war change him?

Rollie might know, and Kay steels herself to beg information from a man her husband has publicly insulted. But neither Kay nor Rollie can anticipate how secrets, lies, and horrifying revelations may destroy them. Do two lonely, passionate rebels have the moral courage to stand up to gossip, defy cultural boundaries, and dare reinvent themselves in a world forever changed?

by Larry Zuckerman • 312 pages • Reader’s Guide

Winner of the 2021 Kops-Fetherling Phoenix Award in Historical Fiction/Winner of the Silver 2021 Reader Views Reviewer’s Choice Award in Historical Fiction

The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out. —Nellie Bly

Elizabeth Cochrane has a secret.

She isn’t the madwoman with amnesia the doctors and inmates at Blackwell’s Asylum think she is.

In truth, she’s working undercover for the New York World. When the managing editor refuses to hire her because she’s a woman, Elizabeth strikes a deal: in exchange for a job, she’ll impersonate a lunatic to expose a local asylum’s abuses.

When she arrives at the asylum, Elizabeth realizes she must make a decision—is she there merely to bear witness, or to intervene on behalf of the abused inmates? Can she interfere without blowing her cover? As the superintendent of the asylum grows increasingly suspicious, Elizabeth knows her scheme—and her dream of becoming a journalist in New York—is in jeopardy.

A Feigned Madness is a meticulously researched, fictionalized account of the woman who would come to be known as daredevil reporter Nellie Bly. At a time of cutthroat journalism, when newspapers battled for readers at any cost, Bly emerged as one of the first to break through the gender barrier—a woman who would, through her daring exploits, forge a trail for women fighting for their place in the world.

by Tonya Mitchell • 396 pages • Reader’s Guide

Psychoanalysis was her family's religion—instead of wafers and wine, there were Seconals, Nembutals, and gin. Baptized into the faith at fourteen, Melissa Knox endured her analyst’s praise of her childlike, victimized mother—who leaned too close, ate off Melissa’s plate, and thought “pedophile” meant “silly person.” Gaslighted with the notions that she’d seduced her father, failed to masturbate, and betrayed her mother, Melissa shouldered the blame. Her story of a family pulled into and torn apart by psychoanalysis exposes the abuse inherent in its authoritarianism as Melissa learns, with a startling sense of humor and admirable chagrin, that divorcing Mom is sometimes the least crazy thing to do.

by Melissa Knox, with a foreword by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson • 226 pages, 9 photos