Assumption, by Mark Stirling, is a warm, faith-centered companion novel that follows Johnny Promise as he reflects on the people and experiences that shaped his understanding of dignity, disability, and human connection. The book opens in a nursing home, where Johnny forms an unlikely friendship with Bobby Ackerman, a resident with autism and Down syndrome who’s frequently dismissed by the people responsible for his care. Their relationship, built through coffee, cartoons, teasing, and patient attention, establishes the book’s central conviction that everyone longs to be recognized as a person.
From there, the novel widens into Johnny’s own story. After suffering a stroke at twenty, he discovers evidence that the twin sister he was told had died at birth may still be alive. His search leads him to Maura, a deaf young woman who was secretly placed in an institution because an older relative considered her defective. The mystery gives the middle of the book momentum, but the reunion and its emotional consequences are what really matter. Johnny and Maura have to build a sibling relationship as adults, introduce her to a family that believed she was dead, and figure out how love can restore something without pretending the lost years never happened.
Stirling’s storytelling feels like listening to someone recount a meaningful life over coffee. Johnny’s voice is plainspoken, funny, sentimental, and openly religious, with plenty of colorful comparisons and conversational detours. At times, he explains the lesson of a scene after the scene has already made it clear, and some antagonistic characters are drawn in broad strokes. Still, the book’s emotional directness suits its narrator. The strongest passages come from small acts of recognition: Bobby being trusted to help with an ambulance siren, Maura preparing to meet her parents, Johnny learning to live with the visible effects of his stroke, and family members adjusting their lives to make room for one another.
This book will appeal most to readers who enjoy inspirational family fiction, stories about disability and caregiving, and novels grounded in Christian faith. Healthcare workers may find Johnny’s observations about compassion, burnout, and patient dignity especially familiar. It’s also a good fit for readers who value an earnest narrator and don’t mind a story wearing its heart openly. Assumption ultimately asks readers to slow down, look beyond the easiest explanation of another person, and remain curious long enough to discover the life that first impressions conceal.
Grace Notes follows an anxious young man who desperately wants to understand why he feels disconnected from himself and others, and whether faith can offer him a place where he truly belongs. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
My life. This book started off as a memoir then morphed into fiction when I realized adding some spice, i.e. fiction, made for a tastier dish, i.e., story. Calling it autofiction is appropriate.
Music plays an important role throughout the book, and the title Grace Notes carries both musical and spiritual meaning. What does the title represent to you personally?
We are, all of us, grace notes in God’s Symphony.
Is a grace note essential to the piece of music or expendable?
That’s the tension I try to maintain throughout the book until its climax in Jerusalem. The tension is established with the conversation between Adam and Jerry on a dorm rooftop when Adam decides that grace notes are expendable, therefore life is meaningless and Jerry’s counterpoint conversation with Andy, who has just attempted suicide, and Jerry advocates that grace notes are essential, so encourages Andy to play his note with all his heart.
Rog, Barbara, and several other mentors leave a lasting impression on Jerry’s life. Were any of these characters inspired by people who helped shape your own journey?
Yes, absolutely. A few years ago, I finally mailed Rog—I was not able to track down an address for Barb, and they had divorced after they left Tenafly—a thank you letter for how much he had really saved my life and introduced me to a world grounded in unconditional love.
Is there a lasting message you hope readers will carry with them after finishing Grace Notes?
In a word: hope. Life can get better. Life can be good. And encourage readers to follow the path with their name and only their name on it towards knowing and accepting who they truly are. It truly is a journey worth taking, always hearing Joseph Campbell’s quote: The privilege of a lifetime is to be who you are. And when you find who you are, there you will find God as well.
As James Baldwin wrote, “You don’t have a home until you leave it.” This isn’t your grandma’s faith journey. It’s Christianity with the gloves off—blisteringly honest, irreverently soulful, and deeply human.
Grace Notes is a spiritual, coming-of-age epic. From a panic attack at a high school party to an emotional reckoning in Jerusalem, Jerry’s path to belief doesn’t follow tradition—it shatters it. Along the way, he stumbles through trauma, seminary, sex, activism, burnout, mysticism, and piano solos that speak when words fail. He loses the trail more than once, but never stops searching for home—spiritual, emotional, and physical.
Marked by raw confession, unexpected grace, and gut-punching moments of revelation, Grace Notes explores what it means to confront your past, embrace your brokenness, and find God in the places you least expect. For readers who are spiritual but skeptical, wounded but seeking, this is the story of how one man’s messy, aching search for belonging leads to belief and the home for which he has always yearned.
Love Her Blind & Other Poems is a restless, emotionally exposed collection that moves through romantic betrayal, childhood violence, family memory, aging, faith, mental illness, and the strange negotiations required to survive all of them. David Somerfleck’s poems often begin with an ordinary object or encounter, then push it into a more charged psychological space. A rocking chair becomes part of a child’s understanding of violence, a bicycle becomes both escape and resistance, and a grandfather becomes something nearly cosmic. The collection’s range is clear in titles such as “My Grandfather’s God,” “Bicycle Rider,” “What I Didn’t Know About Love,” “Tall Time,” and “Mum.”
Somerfleck writes in a dense, image-driven style, piling physical detail onto memory until the past feels immediate and unstable. His strongest poems let metaphor deepen the experience rather than simply decorate it. In “Bicycle Rider,” reading and riding give the speaker a way to move beyond family cruelty, even when that cruelty follows him into sleep and imagination. In “My Grandfather’s God,” ancestry, nature, grief, and belief merge into a vision of blood moving through soil, roots, trees, and stars. These poems don’t treat memory as a tidy record. Memory becomes a living environment, full of weather, animals, wounds, voices, and figures that appear larger than life.
The book’s emotional center is its ongoing attempt to understand love without simplifying it. Love appears as tenderness, obsession, protection, grief, dependency, and renewed possibility. “What I Didn’t Know About Love” begins with harsh, dangerous images, but gradually makes room for a love that can be delicate, clear, and newly understood. That movement gives the collection more than darkness. Even when the poems enter frightening or surreal territory, they keep reaching toward connection, whether through a partner, a parent, a grandparent, an animal, a remembered landscape, or the act of writing itself.
What makes the collection memorable is the sense that every poem has been wrestled out of experience rather than calmly observed from a distance. Somerfleck’s voice can be raw, funny, grotesque, affectionate, angry, and unexpectedly gentle, sometimes within the same piece. The result is a book that feels intensely personal while still opening outward toward questions many readers will recognize: what families pass down, how pain changes perception, why love survives its own damage, and how imagination gives us somewhere to go when reality closes in. Love Her Blind & Other Poems turns bruised memory into fierce, strange music that keeps sounding after the page goes quiet.
The Word is a work of speculative fiction that presents a world in which John, Paul, George, and Ringo are worshipped as gods, and their songs are treated as scripture. What inspired you to write this book?
It was partly the result of a mildly drunken evening with an old friend, a fellow Beatle fan. The talk was of their enduring appeal and the seeming religious language that was used to describe them as they faded into history. They were often described as Gods and certainly John Lennon seemed to have been made into a secular saint in many people’s eyes. One of us remarked that it would make a good book to describe a world in which they had become an actual religion. And hey presto, I wrote the first book, Love Them Do, about a world set in the future where there was One True Religion, and it was based on the songs and ‘teachings’ of the Fab Four.
The letters between Paula and John become one of the book’s emotional anchors. Why did you choose that correspondence as the primary way to explore belief versus skepticism?
This is the second in the series, and the first featured a narrator who was somewhat sceptical of the divine nature of the Beatles. This was partly to highlight the silliness of some aspects of the religion, but also the narrator was a follower of John, a truth seeker and sceptic who famously sang in his song ‘God’, shortly after the break-up of the Beatles, ‘I don’t believe in Beatles’. I felt he therefore represented John’s own open-minded truth seeking. In this book, The Word, the narrator is a follower of Paul and a true believer in the divine nature of the four Gods from Liverpool. I felt this reflected Paul’s love and belief in the band. He was probably the most upset when they split in 1970. The correspondence is therefore between the sceptical narrator from the first book and the true believer of the second, which I felt allowed for a nice interplay between them.
The humor comes from treating everyday moments in Beatles history as profound religious events. Did writing the novel change the way you think about celebrity culture or the stories people tell about their heroes?
Yes, it was quite fun to write in terms of imagining all the religious Orders that appear that follow a particular God or saint in their story and also interpreting quite normal events through the lens of them being divine. In many ways, of course, their story is remarkable, so it wasn’t always a huge leap to give a religious slant to aspects of their story. The book is partly a homage to the Beatles (it is, after all, a nice religion, based on peace, love and laughter) but it is also about the stories we are willing to believe to make our lives bearable, however irrational they might seem to outsiders, which, it seems to me, is how religion works. If you believe my slightly far fetched stories I will give you everlasting life etc. (in Beatle Heaven in this case!).
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
You won’t be surprised to hear that my next book is the third in the series and features a follower of George. It is called Our Sweet Lord and will hopefully be out early next year.
It is 2325 and Paula has faith. She loves all the Gods, John, Paul, George and Ringo. She especially loves Paul and is happily studying his life at the seminary at Blossomwood. She has recently started a correspondence with John studying his own favourite God in the Lennonary at Tittenhurst and his letters are full of small explosions of heresies which Paula finds both frightening and thrilling. Meanwhile the Great Story moves on apace. Paula and her fellow novitiates are studying the magical years when the Beatles conquered all before them, Liverpool, England and even the old USA. Amongst many other things, she learns about the years of Adoration when it was enough for their followers just to be in their presence; she learns about the role of the Second Prophet, Saint Bob who enlightens them one night with magical cigarettes; and she even learns how the Beatles saved Russia not once but twice from the grip of tyranny. And Paula loves the Gods because of their Word. It is the first pillar of the religion. And have you heard? The word is love.
John Cheyenne Wilbur’s Grace Notes is a sprawling spiritual coming-of-age novel about Jerry Cradleman, a gifted, anxious young man whose search for home gradually becomes a search for God. Although it’s fiction, the author explains that the story is rooted in events from his own life, and that personal foundation gives the novel an unusually exposed, confessional quality. Jerry moves from an affluent but emotionally distant childhood in New Jersey through college, seminary, pastoral ministry, relationships, therapy, alternative spiritual communities, and, finally, a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The story covers decades, but its central concern remains steady: Jerry wants to understand why he feels disconnected from himself and other people, and whether faith can offer him a place where he truly belongs.
The strongest element of the novel is Jerry’s complicated inner life. He can be funny, perceptive, needy, impulsive, self-absorbed, and deeply compassionate, sometimes within the same scene. Wilbur doesn’t turn his spiritual development into a smooth progression. Jerry repeatedly confuses love with rescue, certainty with faith, and intense emotion with revelation. His desire for belonging first attaches itself to sports, surrogate parents, romance, professional achievement, and religious authority. After finding warmth in the chaotic home of the youth minister Rog and his wife, Barbara, he writes, “This is my home” and “This is my church.” Those simple lines capture the novel’s emotional core. For Jerry, theology begins as a bodily sensation of being welcomed.
Wilbur tells the story through brisk scenes, energetic dialogue, dreams, sermons, letters, therapy sessions, and moments of music. That variety keeps a long narrative moving and allows serious subjects to sit beside awkward comedy. Jerry’s voice often has the nervous momentum of someone trying to interpret an experience while he’s still caught inside it. Music is especially important, from Mozart and Rachmaninoff to improvised piano sessions. The title’s grace notes become a useful metaphor for the unexpected people and experiences that alter the direction of Jerry’s life. These moments may appear secondary, but they often carry the deepest meaning. The novel’s physical descriptions of anxiety are also convincing. Dread reaches Jerry through his chest, stomach, breath, sweat, and sleeplessness before he has language for its source.
The book grows darker as Jerry’s religious vocation collides with depression, sexual shame, family trauma, and memories of possible childhood abuse. Wilbur approaches these sections through the uncertainty of Jerry’s own perception, including dreams, body memories, therapy, hypnosis, and spiritual practices. That uncertainty makes the reading experience intimate and occasionally unsettling. The later chapters bring together Christianity, Jungian psychology, meditation, vision quests, synchronicity, and New Age spirituality. Jerry’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem gives those threads a dramatic setting, but the journey’s real destination is an altered relationship with his own wounded childhood. When he returns to ministry and prays, “Lord, we are Your lost sheep. Help us find our way home,” the words feel earned because he’s finally including himself among the lost rather than pretending to lead from a place of certainty.
Grace Notes is an earnest, emotionally generous novel about faith as a lived struggle rather than an intellectual conclusion. Its scope is large, and Jerry’s repeated crises create a deliberately restless rhythm, reflecting a man who keeps moving because standing still would require him to feel everything he’s avoided. The ending, which reconnects him with April and an unexpected responsibility, brings the idea of home into practical life. Home becomes something he may have to build through presence, care, and commitment, not simply a mystical place he can discover. That makes the novel’s final movement satisfying. Jerry doesn’t finish with every question answered, but he has learned to remain beside another person and say, “I’m here.”
Ian Croskell’s The Word is a playful blend of speculative fiction, Beatles history, religious satire, and coming-of-age story. Set centuries after the band’s lifetime, it imagines a society in which John, Paul, George, and Ringo are worshipped as gods, their songs are treated as scripture, and places connected to their lives have become religious sites. The story follows Paula, a student in the Order of Paul at Blossomwood, as she studies the “Great Story” and exchanges letters with John, a more sceptical student from the Order of John. Through classes, legends, pilgrimages, and personal reflections, the book revisits the Beatles’ rise while showing how history can gradually turn into mythology.
The book’s most distinctive feature is the way it transforms familiar Beatles details into sacred traditions. Managers become saints, concerts become miracles, instruments become relics, and song lyrics are interpreted as spiritual teachings. Croskell clearly knows the band’s history, and he draws on an impressive range of anecdotes about their music, relationships, public appearances, collaborators, and cultural impact. The humor often comes from the gap between the original event and the grand religious meaning later attached to it. A snowstorm becomes divine intervention, a pop television appearance becomes a revelation, and Paul’s missing bass inspires a quest worthy of medieval legend. It’s affectionate satire, driven less by mockery than by curiosity about why people need heroes, stories, rituals, and places of pilgrimage.
Paula gives the book its warmth. She’s devout, romantic, talkative, and increasingly willing to question what she’s been taught. Her letters to John create an engaging tension between belief and doubt, particularly when they discuss the love between Lennon and McCartney, the reliability of religious texts, and the human need to find meaning in coincidence and loss. Their conversations keep the novel from becoming only a collection of Beatles facts. By the final chapter, the friendships forming around Paula begin to echo the Beatles’ own origins, giving the story a satisfying sense of renewal. The book’s leisurely, anecdotal structure means that it often feels like spending time with an enthusiastic fan who keeps remembering one more story, but that conversational quality is also central to its charm.
This book will appeal most to readers who already enjoy Beatles history and are open to seeing it rearranged into an imaginative new mythology. Fans who recognize the references, quotations, supporting figures, and small historical incidents will get the richest experience, especially those interested in Lennon and McCartney’s complicated creative bond. It should also suit readers who like gentle religious satire, alternate futures, and novels that mix ideas with character rather than racing through a tightly plotted adventure. The Word is a warm, funny meditation on fandom, faith, friendship, and the stories people build around the artists they love.
My Last Day, by Michael J. Nohe, is an intimate, spiritually minded novel about Robert Sanctus, a brilliant and wealthy Wall Street trader who learns at thirty-four that he has only months to live. Determined to avoid a painful decline, Rob plans to end his life on his own terms after one final day in New York City. He records the experience in a candid journal filled with sharp observations, restless questions, and the gallows humor of a man trying to remain himself while facing the one problem he can’t outthink. Framed by a foreword and afterword from his accountant, the book reads like a personal document left behind by someone who needs to understand what happened before anyone else can.
Rob’s journey unfolds through a series of encounters that gradually pull him out of his private despair. A confrontation with a desperate young man becomes an opportunity for a second chance. A visit to a neighborhood bar uncovers an astonishing family connection. A mysterious conversation in a vanished church challenges Rob’s certainty about faith, control, and death. Later, his meeting with a homeless mother and her son gives his wealth a new and urgent purpose. Nohe builds the story around these human exchanges, letting each one widen Rob’s view of what a single day can hold and how quickly one compassionate decision can travel into other lives.
The book’s strongest quality is Rob’s voice. He’s intelligent, opinionated, funny, generous, skeptical, and sometimes frustratingly eager to wander down a side road. His digressions about finance, baseball, coffee, music, New York, and Rocky Road ice cream make the journal feel lived-in rather than polished into something distant. Beneath the humor is a serious meditation on mortality, suicide, regret, providence, and the difference between earning a fortune and putting it to meaningful use. The conversational style keeps those ideas accessible, while the recurring emphasis on second chances gives the story its emotional shape.
My Last Day is ultimately a story about a man who thinks he’s preparing to leave the world and discovers that he still has time to change it. Rob’s final acts connect families, restore hope, create a lasting refuge, and transform the legacy he’ll leave behind. The result is warm, reflective, and deeply sincere, with an ending that earns its emotion by showing how kindness becomes larger when it’s passed from one person to the next. My Last Day reminds us that a life’s true measure isn’t how long it lasts, but how much hope it leaves behind.
Danila Botha’s A Place for People Like Us is an intimate novel about Hannah, a university student trying to build a stable identity after an upbringing in an abusive spiritual commune. Her life becomes divided between two powerful attachments. Jillian, a charismatic musician, offers artistic freedom, sexual possibility, and the intoxicating promise that “there’s a place for people like us.” Naftali Goldwater offers romantic devotion, financial security, and entry into Toronto’s Orthodox Jewish community. Rather than treating these worlds as simple opposites, Botha shows how each gives Hannah something she genuinely needs while also asking her to surrender parts of herself.
Hannah is a compelling narrator because her hunger for belonging shapes both her insight and her blindness. She recognizes manipulation in others, yet she remains vulnerable to anyone who makes her feel chosen. Her relationship with Jillian is especially vivid, moving among friendship, collaboration, desire, rivalry, caretaking, and mutual dependence. Jillian’s magnetism is rendered with enough force that Hannah’s loyalty feels emotionally credible even when the friendship becomes destructive. Naftali’s appeal is similarly grounded. Hannah’s observation that “I liked the person I was when I was with him” captures the deeper attraction of their relationship: he seems to offer not only love, but a more coherent version of herself.
Botha writes with directness, dark humour, and an attentive eye for the social meaning of clothes, food, money, music, and domestic spaces. The novel’s detailed portrayal of Orthodox practice gives Hannah’s conversion emotional and material weight, from study and ritual to marriage, hair covering, and family expectations. These details support a broader examination of how communities create identity through shared language and customs. It is worth noting that the large supporting cast can occasionally crowd Hannah’s central conflict, and the later plot moves through several dramatic turns in quick succession, but the accumulation also conveys how thoroughly her private choices become entangled with families, institutions, and public appearances.
A Place for People Like Us is a novel about the price of being welcomed. Hannah repeatedly enters spaces that promise safety, first through Jillian’s artistic refuge and then through the Goldwater family’s religious and social structure. Botha’s strongest achievement is her refusal to reduce belonging to either rescue or confinement. It can nurture, seduce, discipline, and distort, often at the same time. The closing pages bring Hannah to a painful but credible recognition that a life built around other people’s certainty can’t replace the work of knowing herself. Botha’s work is ideal for readers who enjoy emotionally charged stories that examine trauma, intimacy, faith, and the difficult freedom of choosing one’s own future.
