Lady of the Castle
Rachel Elwiss Joyce’s Lady of the Castle is an expansive work of historical fiction centered on Nicola de la Haye, the hereditary constable of Lincoln Castle, during the political and religious upheavals of late twelfth-century England. Although it’s the second novel in a series, the book is structured to stand alone, establishing Nicola’s unusual position as a landholder, military authority, wife, and mother in a society that expects women to submit. The narrative moves from the final years of Henry II’s reign through Richard I’s absence on crusade, combining domestic conflict with royal intrigue, siege warfare, famine, religious tension, and the precarious lives of England’s Jewish communities.
The novel’s emotional core is Nicola’s marriage to Gerard de Camville. Their relationship is shaped by bereavement, resentment, sexual distance, political disagreement, and Gerard’s jealousy of Nicola’s first husband. Joyce gives both characters credible grievances, allowing their estrangement to develop through accumulated injuries. Nicola’s grief after the death of her young son affects her judgment as a mother and wife, while Gerard’s longing to feel chosen gradually compromises his loyalty and self-respect. Their damaged ivory chess queen becomes an effective symbol of a marriage that remains recognizable despite its fractures. Nicola’s declaration, “I’m the constable here, and I’m taking back control,” captures both her public authority and her determination to reclaim a self diminished by grief and concession.
Joyce’s large cast gives the novel unusual breadth. Nicola’s children and foster son have substantial individual stories, particularly Tilly’s struggle with self-worth and marriage, and Turstin’s search for purpose within monastic life. The parallel narrative involving Bella, Berechiah, Leon, and Licoricia presents Jewish family life with domestic specificity while showing how royal exploitation and crusading fervor turn familiar neighbors into targets. These strands converge with the broader struggles among Henry II, Richard, John, and their officials, making national instability feel immediate and personal. The historical detail is extensive, from castle administration and land reclamation to worship, medicine, debt, and military defense. At times, the number of characters and political developments slows the novel’s forward motion, but the scale also produces a convincing portrait of a society in which private lives are inseparable from law, faith, inheritance, and royal power.
Lady of the Castle is a novel about authority joined to responsibility. Nicola’s strength lies not simply in commanding men or defending walls, but in learning that protection can’t depend on control alone. Her development requires her to reconsider her memories, acknowledge her failures, and recognize the forms of courage shown by people whose experiences differ from her own. The book’s combination of intimate family drama and medieval political epic gives its long narrative a clear thematic unity. Its most persuasive achievement is the presentation of history as lived experience, full of bodily danger, compromised loyalties, enduring prejudice, and relationships that survive only when affection is matched by honesty. Lady of the Castle is a sweeping tale of a marriage under siege, a kingdom in turmoil, and the fierce cost of protecting those we love.
ASIN: B0H99QDFB9
A Grand Façade: Stories of Truth and Fiction
James L. Peters’s A Grand Façade is a wide-ranging collection of personal essays, short stories, and an extended musical memoir. Peters brings the pieces together through a recurring interest in the fronts people build around their ambitions, fears, relationships, and failures. The nonfiction moves from childhood rebellion and family memories to cancer, grief, creativity, travel, and mortality, while the fiction gives those same concerns more symbolic and unsettling forms. The centerpiece is the lengthy title memoir, which follows Peters, his wife Melanie, and his friend Tim through years of writing, recording, performing, and trying to turn a deeply personal band into something sustainable. The book’s introduction openly frames the collection as an attempt to use both fact and invention to reach emotional truth, and that idea gives the varied material a clear center.
Peters is at his best when he’s examining his younger self with equal parts fondness, embarrassment, and honesty. Essays about stealing school silverware, giving a friend the cold shoulder over a teenage party, or misunderstanding his father’s disapproval are funny at first, then gradually reveal regret, compassion, or a changed perspective. That same self-scrutiny makes the musical memoir engaging even for readers who’ve never played in a band. It’s full of shabby studios, awkward gigs, creative breakthroughs, bruised egos, financial strain, and friendships tested by competing ideas of success. Peters doesn’t turn the adventure into a simple victory or cautionary tale. He treats it as a worthwhile, damaging, exhilarating choice that helped shape his marriage, career, art, and understanding of himself.
The short fiction broadens the collection’s emotional range. “Dirty Vowels” uses an overheard couple’s noisy sex life to expose the frustrations inside another marriage, while “Rabbits in the Mouths of Wolves” turns mysterious bags of garbage into a tense parable about status, fairness, and social conformity. “Twinkle” approaches cosmic catastrophe through an intimate human relationship, and “The Muse on Your Back” captures the loneliness, addiction, and manufactured persona surrounding a rising musician. Some of the older stories show their age through heavier exposition or symbolism, and the memoir’s extensive chronology occasionally slows the pace. Still, Peters’s directness and wry humor keep the book personable. He’s willing to be the fool, the wounded son, the difficult bandmate, and the frightened patient, which gives the collection warmth without sanding away its harsher edges.
I’d recommend A Grand Façade most strongly to readers who enjoy memoirs about ordinary Midwestern lives, creative ambition, aging, family, and the complicated afterlife of youthful dreams. Musicians and other artists who’ve spent years pursuing recognition will especially appreciate its account of the work, compromise, friendship, and stubborn hope behind an independent creative life. It’ll also suit readers who like collections that move between candid autobiography and speculative or literary fiction while returning to a shared set of questions. Peters’s central insight is persuasive: a failed dream can still produce a meaningful life, and looking honestly at the façade may reveal something more valuable than the success once imagined.
Messy and Unpredictable
The Last Revision follows a man reflecting on his life as he navigates present-day physical limitations while revisiting vivid memories of childhood, family, romance, art, work, Buddhist practice, and life in New York City. What inspired you to structure the story around these reflections?
The structure of the book came from an intersection of three things. First, I was approaching my sixtieth birthday and was having a hard time of it, unlike approaching my 50th, which I relished and celebrated. At sixty, I was asking myself, “What happened? What’s left?” and I was fearful of forgetting, as I entered my third act. So, I wanted to write everything down before I forgot. In fact, I didn’t set out to write a memoir at all. It was an exercise in documentation. Secondly, I had always said I wanted to live to be a hundred years old, to see a century — how amazing would that be?! And lastly, my sister, author Patience Bloom, encouraged me to join the NaNoWriMo challenge (i.e., write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November). With that deadline looming, an idea popped into my head: a “memoir hypothesis.” Tell my story from the end of my life, from 100 years old. So, everything to 60 years old is true. Or mostly, as memory is imperfect. The rest is speculation. The original idea was to have two timelines intersecting. Chapter 1 would be the end, at 100. Chapter 2 would be the very early years. Chapter 3 would be somewhere in the early 90s, and so on until the timelines intersected. But somewhere along the way, like memory does, my mind drifted here and there, to the “present” and backward and then sideways. The title, The Last Revision, is the main character’s (and my) attempt to concretize what Bill remembers.
The novel explores LGBTQ+ identity across different periods of social change. How did you approach portraying the fears, challenges, and freedoms that shaped Bill’s life?
Because this is partially a work of auto-fiction, many of the experiences are my own — I didn’t have to research them. From being bullied as a child to feeling society’s tacit (or not so tacit) disapproval of anyone across the LGBTQ+ spectrum, there is a wealth of material to draw from. Anyone who has felt “different” from an early age carries those feelings with them, and it is important to know them and grapple with them so that one can live freely in the world. I imagined that, based on Bill’s (my) own experiences as a young and subsequently middle-aged person, Bill wouldn’t become truly fearless and comfortable in his own skin until later in life, which he does. I’ll also add that writing this book further helped me in my own journey of living freely in the world. I mean, I’m an out gay man, but with the publishing of this book, I’m really out.
Bill’s relationship with Andres is one of the emotional anchors of the novel. What did you want to explore about love, vulnerability, and the process of allowing oneself to be fully seen?
I wanted to explore the ups and downs of a relationship, of a marriage. We see so many stories on TV and in films in which relationships are one thing, good or bad, or they are good, then bad, then amazing. But it’s not that simple. Relationships can be incredibly challenging, inspiring, infuriating, titillating, moving, comforting, scary, and beautiful — all at the same time. They are messy and unpredictable, and ultimately rewarding. I wanted to show that one can — one has to — be oneself in a relationship, in a marriage, and that good things come from actively working on this.
What message do you hope readers carry with them after spending time with Bill?
My hope is that readers will feel seen in some way. Bill goes through many, many ups and downs throughout his long life, but he never gives up. As a practitioner of Nichiren Buddhism with SGI for nearly 40 years, I embrace our motto to “never be defeated.” This doesn’t mean that we won’t have disappointments or that we will get everything we want. Rather, the goal is to never let one’s spirit be defeated, to never lose hope for the future, no matter what happens. If The Last Revision can instill an iota of this hope in a reader, I will be very, very happy.
Author Links: GoodReads | Threads | Website | Amazon
His journal.
And the memories begin.
The Last Revision moves through an entire life—from an Easter morning in upstate New York, through childhood moves across continents, a hard-won coming out, years of solitude in a New York City studio apartment, a late and lasting love, and a world that slowly, then all at once, changes beyond recognition. Bill has lived all of it. And on the eve of his hundredth birthday, he is finally willing to look.
Written from the imagined perspective of a man forty years older than the author, the novel blends lived memory with an invented future—reconstructing the past as it was, and imagining what might come after. The result is a life seen whole: remembered, revised, and, at last, understood.
At once intimate and expansive, The Last Revision is a novel about what it feels like to hold a life in your hands all at once—the losses and the luck, the curtain calls and the heartbreaks—and discover, with something close to astonishment, that it was a joy.
India Has Changed So Radically
Patriots in Shadows reimagines the catastrophic 1944 explosion at Bombay’s Victoria Docks as the climax of a coordinated sabotage campaign. What inspired you to build your story around this historical event?
This event is not well known in Indian history, and the origin of the blasts has never been established. I felt it was a good point to conclude a fiction novel.
Your story blends real wartime history with fictional espionage. How did you decide where to remain faithful to the historical record and where to let your imagination take over?
Most of the time I have remained faithful to the historical record. The imagination was building the five women who play the central role. One of the reasons for creating these was that the role of women in India’s freedom struggle has not been brought out fully, and especially those from affluent backgrounds.
Much of the novel focuses on logistics—railways, shipping, military supply chains, communications, and administration. How much historical research went into recreating these systems?
I grew up in India in a very politically aware family and then traveled extensively in the country to almost all tier 1 and 2 cities in the seventies and throughout the eighties. A lot of British established systems/buildings and establishments had still been living in the past. These were experienced directly, and since I am in the midst of research on India’s Freedom fight history, I have been going through hundreds of documents and books which helped provide more details.
What conversations do you hope readers have after finishing the book?
India has changed so radically in the last few decades that the new generation has no idea about the history/environment and life in the pre-Independence era, and it is rarely discussed in the West. I will be happy if a reader feels that some different perspective has come to their attention.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Website
The Indian National Army of Subhas Chandra Bose is on the Indo-Burma border seeking to liberate India. The British Indian Army is engaged in war with Allied support to prevent this.
A chain of events begins undermining the war efforts of the British Indian Army. Arsenals burn, army convoys are sabotaged, trains carrying aircraft parts explode, and senior colonial officials collapse without explanation in the secure atmosphere of a prestigious club.
As investigators chase shadows across the subcontinent, a chilling truth emerges: a clandestine network is striking at the heart of imperial power. Ordinary people, driven by belief rather than recognition, perform extraordinary acts that quietly challenge imperial power.
Inspired by real wartime events, this historical espionage thriller explores resistance, secrecy, and moral courage during the final years of the British Empire.
On April 14th, 1944, two major events occurred. The Indian National Army raised the flag of Free India for the first time in the liberated area in Manipur at Moirang Kangla.
Same day, a devastating blast at Bombay’s Victoria Docks rains gold, destroys ships, and sends shockwaves through British India. This was the biggest explosion in the Eastern theater of World War 2 till dropping of the atomic bomb.
Fallible and Not Bulletproof
Jack Spetza – Flawed follows a fashion designer who uncovers her mother’s ancient secret and is pulled into a dangerous conspiracy involving lost history, time travel, advanced technology, and a mysterious soldier-author with hidden motives. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I wrote every day for a few hours just putting down ideas, and when Jack was born, the rate of words and scenarios increased exponentially.
Jack Spetza is a hero who is charming, flawed, dangerous, and unpredictable. What interested you about writing a protagonist who doesn’t fit the traditional heroic mold?
I just felt comfortable with having Jack be fallible and not bulletproof, because otherwise it wouldn’t be realistic, and with all of his experience, he could usually handle himself and most situations he ended up being in.
The novel balances action, humor, romance, science fiction, and historical mystery. Was maintaining that balance challenging, and how did you decide when to lean into each genre element?
I wrote every chapter like a short story, then as I got closer to the end of the book, I started putting each chapter in the place I thought made the most sense.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
Jack Spetza will ride again in the second and third books, with the second becoming available next year.
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Drawn into a war that stretches across time itself, Jack is thrown together with Setrina La Touche, the woman he never truly got over and the heir to her mother’s research into an ancient tribe that mysteriously disappeared centuries ago.
From Parisian alleyways to hidden Moroccan caves, betrayal is constant, trust is rare, and every move sends ripples through past and future. Time doesn’t forgive, and there’s no clean way to get your hands dirty.
Jack Spetza – Flawed will keep you on the edge of your seat.
My Love of Languages
English Upgrade is a practical grammar workbook that helps Spanish-speaking learners recognize persistent mistakes, understand why they happen, and communicate in more natural, precise English. What inspired you to create this book?
My students! My love of languages and passion for empowering others brought me to the ESL field. A lack of good resources compelled me to write English Upgrade (¡Para Hispanohablantes!). I set out to create a potent and effective tool for Spanish-speaking English learners and their teachers, and I’ve done just that. I hope to one day create a similar guide for native speakers of Haitian Creole, Bahasa Indonesia, and other languages.
How did you decide which grammar problems and language patterns to include in the sixty-one lessons?
I hold a BA in the Spanish language, studied at the Autónoma of Guadalajara, Mexico, and spent years interfacing with native Spanish speakers in bilingual customer service roles before becoming an English as a Second Language teacher. This mixture of experiences has given me unique insight on the most consistent and predictable mistakes that native Spanish speakers make and why they make them. The list is not exhaustive, but I tried to include the grammar structures, vocabulary, and pronunciation challenges that have the greatest impact on learners’ ability to communicate effectively.
What makes direct comparison between Spanish and English especially effective for language learners?
With a side-by-side, red/green, ❌/✔️ format, readers get an effective and easy-to-understand visual. This structure makes English Upgrade accessible, even to beginner and intermediate learners.
How would you recommend that independent learners and teachers use the book differently?
There’s no wrong way to use this book. (But please don’t use it as kindling! 😊) It can be used as a classroom textbook, read from cover to cover, or independent learners can use it as a quick reference guide. The index at the back of the book makes it easy for readers to find the grammar point, vocabulary, pronunciation pattern, and idiomatic or fixed expressions they’re looking for. The book is intended to be written and highlighted in and includes a lined Notes section ideal for independent study. I wrote it for you; please make it your own!
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website
Award-winning bilingual author and seasoned English as a Second Language teacher, Maria L. Hinders, presents English Upgrade: The Advanced Learner’s Guide to the Most Common English Language Errors: (¡Para Hispanohablantes!). Hinders has compiled over 170 of the most common and predictable English language errors made by native Spanish speakers and, in English Upgrade, addresses each of them with concise and easy-to-understand explanations. English Upgrade is a practical guide that’s geared toward advanced learners, but with its simplistic X/Check format, beginners will find it useful, too. English Upgrade features 51 chapters comprising 171 error corrections, hundreds of examples, over 100 idioms and fixed expressions, and over 500 practice questions. Upgrade your English today!
The Unknown
Makanda centers on a crime scene investigator investigating a series of mutilated bodies dating back to 1973 in a region where local legend, cryptid folklore, and biological terror blur into nightmare. Where did the idea behind this story come from?
There exist real police reports and other supporting documents from 1973 from people who saw the Big Muddy Monster firsthand. Funnily enough, I’m acquainted with one of several people who saw the monster and were interviewed by the local Murphysboro police department (though I didn’t find that out until after I’d written my novel). I took eyewitness accounts and local legend and combined them with violence, gore, fear, suspense, and a giant dash of biology to add my own nefarious spin onto the landscape and unsuspecting folks of southern Illinois.
Giant City State Park becomes almost a character itself in the story. How did the landscape and atmosphere of southern Illinois shape the tone and direction of the novel?
Giant City State Park is a legitimate character in real life. The park is huge and beautiful. Every day, folks come from all over the world to visit the park and its gorgeous winding trails, verdant expanse, and serene landscape. The Shawnee National Forest here in southern Illinois is exceptionally large, with a varied terrain of rock formations, woods, creeks, wetlands, and flora and fauna. The park is peaceful yet dark and brooding come sundown. It’s quite atmospheric in many ways.
The idea of a local legend returning in a new form is central to Makanda. What do you hope readers take away about the relationship between myths, fear, and the unknown?
I hope that folks understand that while times change, people change, and landscapes change, our cemented fears rarely change. Sure, it can be said that myths change – which they do (that’s part of the allure of our myths and legends). But at the end of the day, those myths, fears, and the unknown rarely change in our minds. The circumstances that cause that fear may change, but the idea behind the fear remains the same. We will always be afraid of the what-ifs. We will always be afraid of the unknown. And we will always be afraid of the boogeyman in whatever form it manifests itself. Don’t believe me? Go and read IT by Stephen King. That book will change your mind.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I write all the time. Even on days that I’m physically and mentally drained, I have to write so as to offer my mind some respite from itself. I refer to the endless library of information inside my mind as my Hoard. Inside my Hoard are a plethora of folks, and the only thing they require to become real and substantial is my unwavering, incessant need to write. If I write, those folks inside my Hoard become quiet. If they’re quiet, I’m allowed a smidgeon of peace from time to time. With that said, I have enough written works to release one novel every year or two for the next two decades. However, as it currently stands, I do not yet know what book will be released next. I’ll pray to God for clarity on what comes next. But I will say that I’m leaning towards a collection of short stories based solely on southern Missouri during the summer. Whatever book comes next will be within the next year and a half to two years.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
When mutilated hikers begin turning up in Giant City State Park, crime scene investigator Janice Redfield suspects the truth is far worse than an animal attack. Decades earlier, locals whispered about the Big Muddy Monster—a towering nightmare blamed for a string of brutal deaths in 1973. Now the legend is waking up.
Born from a microscopic parasite older than history, the creature grows smarter and deadlier with every host it consumes—cricket, snake, deer, man—until it becomes a towering apex predator with a hunger for perfection. As blood floods forests, classrooms, and homes, science, obsession, and violence collide.
Makanda is a relentless descent into body horror, biological terror, and vivid brutality—where survival may demand the unthinkable, and mercy comes at the price of sanity.
Allison Turns The Page
Allison Turns the Page, by Leslie A. Rasmussen, is a warm, comic novel about a bestselling author whose professional success arrives before she’s emotionally prepared for it. Allison Hoffman has written a celebrated romance, but she’s blocked on her second novel and increasingly convinced that her own love life proves she’s a fraud. Her search for inspiration leads to disastrous dates, a self-published revenge story, an anonymous correspondence through a neighborhood book box, and a romantic choice that forces her to confront how often fear has shaped her decisions. Rasmussen gives Allison a lively first-person voice, full of anxious observations, pop-culture references, and jokes that often reveal more than Allison intends.
The book’s strongest feature is its combination of humor and emotional self-scrutiny. Allison can turn an awkward pharmacy line, a family meal, or a blind date into a comic set piece, yet her humor also functions as armor. Beneath the running jokes about dating apps, biological clocks, terrible reviews, and her rescue dog Sally, she’s dealing with abandonment, envy, creative insecurity, and a deep fear that loving someone gives them permission to leave. Her family and friends are drawn broadly, but they have enough affection and friction to feel like people who’ve known one another for years. Olivia, Allison’s blunt younger sister, is especially effective because her teasing can be irritating, funny, and unexpectedly perceptive within the same conversation.
Readers who enjoy Bridget Jones’s Diary will recognize the appeal of a heroine who narrates her romantic mistakes with embarrassing honesty. Allison shares Bridget’s gift for spiraling from a small uncertainty into a complete personal catastrophe, but Rasmussen places more emphasis on creative identity and the publishing world. The novel also has some of Sophie Kinsella’s comic rhythm, particularly when Allison’s attempts to protect herself create increasingly complicated misunderstandings. Still, the story’s emotional center belongs to Allison’s development as a writer. Her failed second novel, essays about her personal life, and eventual return to fiction aren’t side plots. They mirror her gradual willingness to stop performing confidence and begin telling the truth.
At times, Allison’s romantic indecision may test readers who spot the healthier choice before she does. Yet that also captures the mind of someone who can recognize her habits intellectually while continuing to repeat them emotionally. By the conclusion, her growth feels earned because the story lets her make selfish, frightened, and messy choices before she learns to take responsibility for them. Allison Turns the Page is an upbeat, character-driven romantic comedy about writing your way through failure, trusting happiness when it appears, and realizing that becoming ready for love begins with becoming honest about yourself.
Pages: 270 | ASIN : B0GX32GQHM
