Blog Archives
It Is About Rediscovering Herself
This Case and My Life follows an attorney whose carefully managed double life unravels in a single turbulent day, forcing him and the women affected by his betrayals to confront the consequences. What inspired Stacey’s journey from heartbreak to independence?
Stacey’s journey begins with denial. For quite some time, she senses that something is wrong in her marriage, but she continues making excuses because accepting the possibility of Chris’s betrayal is more painful than questioning her own suspicions. Eventually, she reaches a point where she can no longer lie to herself. She hires a private investigator because she needs to know the truth, whatever that truth may be.
As painful as the discovery is, knowing the truth also gives Stacey something she had been missing: clarity. She realizes that for months she had been living in a marriage that no longer felt loving or emotionally secure. What had once felt like home no longer did.
I wanted Stacey’s journey to show that sometimes strength begins with the decision to stop accepting a life that is making you unhappy. Divorce is painful, and healing does not happen overnight, but Stacey slowly discovers that there is life after the end of a marriage. She learns to stand on her own, regain her independence, and eventually find peace.
Her journey is not simply about leaving Chris. It is about rediscovering herself and realizing that the end of one chapter does not have to be the end of her story.
What do the red roses symbolize throughout Chris’s unraveling relationships?
The red roses are a small detail with a much larger meaning.
Chris had always bought Stacey yellow roses because yellow was her favorite color. So when he gives her red roses, Stacey immediately knows something is wrong. Those roses were not chosen with her in mind. Red roses are Bridget’s favorite, and in that moment, Chris unknowingly allows one part of his carefully separated life to cross into another.
For me, the roses symbolize how Chris’s double life begins to unravel through the details he has stopped paying attention to. He is so accustomed to feeling confident and in control that he believes he can manage every situation. Professionally, he is a successful attorney who is used to winning cases and solving problems. But his personal life cannot be managed like a case in a courtroom.
The red roses become a symbol of betrayal, but also of carelessness. Chris believes he is still controlling the circumstances around him, when in reality the consequences of his choices have already begun catching up with him.
Why was it important to show the consequences of Chris’s actions from several perspectives?
It was important to me because the consequences of betrayal rarely belong to only one person.
Although Chris is at the center of the story, his decisions affect Stacey, Bridget, Kathy, and ultimately himself in very different ways. By allowing readers to experience events from several perspectives, I wanted them to see that the same situation can look completely different depending on who is living through it.
Chris is confident, successful, and accustomed to being in control. He believes he can handle whatever comes his way. But while he is busy managing his professional life and trying to keep his personal worlds separate, the people around him are experiencing consequences he does not fully see.
I also did not want to tell readers exactly whom they should sympathize with or how they should judge each character. People are complicated, relationships are complicated, and choices create consequences that can reach much further than we expect. Showing several perspectives gives readers the opportunity to understand each character’s motivations and emotions and ultimately form their own conclusions.
That was very important to me when writing This Case and My Life.
Which character changed the most during the writing process, and how did that development surprise you?
Stacey surprised me the most.
At the beginning, much of her identity is connected to her marriage and to the life she built with Chris. She is hurt, suspicious, and eventually devastated by what she discovers. But as I continued writing her story, she became much more than the betrayed wife.
She developed courage and strength. Instead of allowing Chris’s choices to define the rest of her life, she chose to move forward. She gradually regained her independence, found healing and inner peace, and eventually reached a place where forgiveness became possible.
What surprised me most was that her strength did not come from anger or revenge. It came from letting go. Stacey did not need to destroy Chris in order to rebuild herself. She simply needed to decide that her life could continue without him.
In many ways, Stacey’s journey became one of rediscovery. She learned that beginning again does not erase what happened; it means choosing not to allow the past to determine what happens next. She found happiness again on her own terms.
That evolution made her one of the characters whose journey I found especially meaningful to write.
Closing note:
This Case and My Life is the first book in an ongoing series, and the characters’ lives continue to evolve beyond this initial story. Books Two and Three are available now, with Book Four coming in October. Each sequel reveals new layers of these characters, their relationships, their choices, and the unexpected consequences that continue to shape their lives.
Author Links: Facebook | Instagram | GoodReads
Chris has built his career on control—mastering arguments, anticipating outcomes, and believing that with enough preparation, life can be won like a case in court. As a successful attorney, he knows how to fight, how to win, and how to keep emotions at bay.
But when a pivotal case begins to bleed into his personal life, the carefully ordered world he relies on starts to unravel.
Caught between professional ambition and an unexpected emotional awakening, Chris is forced to confront choices no legal training could prepare him for. The harder he tries to maintain control, the clearer it becomes that some truths cannot be negotiated, postponed, or appealed.
Set against the backdrop of law, love, and life’s inconvenient timing, This Case and My Life is a romantic comedy-drama about ambition, connection, and the courage it takes to step away from certainty and into something real.
Some cases are decided in court.
Others are decided in the heart.
It’s complicated… but that is life.
The Stories Of Women In The Past
The Aphorism Club follows a brilliant young Australian woman who, rejected by her family because of her birthmark, finds strength among artists and outsiders as she fights to become a writer and claim authority over her future. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I have always been inspired by the stories of women in the past, and in my own past who have struggled against injustice, rejection, suppressive social norms to become their own person. To find and use the gifts they have to make a life initially denied them. This is not just a thing of the past as young people are swamped by social perceptions of beauty and personal worth based on how they look, or what they wear or how much money they have. I want readers to have a role model who embodies the fact that there is nothing more you need than to be at home in your own skin, to value your talents and build the community you want to be a part of.
Why did you choose the aphorism “Look up and find a light, or build a fire yourself” as a guiding principle for Ruby’s journey?
This is perhaps my own guiding principle. Optimism, self-reliance, problem solving and self-belief are superpowers, much under-valued superpowers, but ones, if mastered allows a life to be built. Ruby is smart, given wise counsel and encouraged to take control of her destiny and shed any thought of being a victim of circumstance. She is led to believe that seeing yourself as a victim is stultifying, seeing yourself as a survivor is empowering.
The novel contrasts “the family you got” with “the family you made.” What did you want Ruby’s chosen communities to reveal about the meaning of family?
Love comes in all forms and at the heart of ‘family’ is respect. Respect for all one is, and what one wants to be. A family is a cheer-squad, a protective cordon that is prepared to kick you in the pants if you need it. The family Ruby has made in the Aphorism Club reveals that connection is not about what makes us the same but how we appreciate and value the uniqueness of individuals.
How did you balance Ruby’s personal coming-of-age story with the novel’s exploration of suffrage, class, sexuality, reproductive autonomy, war, and labor conditions?
Setting the novel in the 1920s meant the key social changes had to be recognised. Ruby’s awakening to injustice in her community gave voice to her writing. In essence, she recognised that she could have had a life of comfort given her family’s wealth and position, but she really only grows out of naivety and perhaps a little self-pity when she comes to understand that life for women, particularly those in the lower socio-economic classes, is bereft of opportunity, potentially violent and utterly miserable. And it is key to women today understanding how our female ancestors fought for the life we now live. While we have a way to go, the privileges of the few in the early 20th century are now for all.
Author Links: Facebook | Website | Instagram
In Melbourne in 1910, Ruby Pearl Hart is born into a family that does not want her. Failing to appreciate her gifts, all they see is the raspberry birthmark on her face.
Cast out, Ruby finds a makeshift family with the colourful misfits populating her Aunt’s home, the Mary Street Terrace. Here, her intelligence, creativity and hope are allowed to thrive.
But when tragedy strikes, Ruby’s ambitions for her life seem dashed. It’s not until she is forced to move from Melbourne to Launceston that she comes to understand the battle for women’s freedom is still being waged – and for some, life is much, much worse.
Exiled in this small town, she meets a group of artists and writers who call themselves ‘The Aphorism Club’. Unique, clever and bohemian, they too are broken and cut adrift. In them, Ruby finally finds a safe harbour where she can dream, dance and reach for a life beyond social expectations.
In Tracey Lee’s The Aphorism Club, there are forces working against Ruby that will take more than hope to overcome. In an unprecedented shift, Ruby is given a choice – but can she hope to make the right one in a world determined to keep her down?
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Fiction
The Literary Titan Book Award honors books that exhibit exceptional storytelling and creativity. This award celebrates novelists who craft compelling narratives, create memorable characters, and weave stories that captivate readers. The recipients are writers who excel in their ability to blend imagination with literary skill, creating worlds that enchant and narratives that linger long after the final page is turned.
Award Recipients
Restoration by Laura Brooke
Even Angels Wear Leather Jackets and Ride Motorcycles by J.A. McGovern
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Literary Titan Silver Book Award
Celebrating the brilliance of outstanding authors who have captivated us with their skillful prose, engaging narratives, and compelling real and imagined characters. We recognize books that stand out for their innovative storytelling and insightful exploration of truth and fiction. Join us in honoring the dedication and skill of these remarkable authors as we celebrate the diverse and rich worlds they’ve brought to life, whether through the realm of imagination or the lens of reality.
Award Recipients
Crescent City Requiem by Brian Kaufman
The Suicide Council by Victer Hugo Basurco
Departure from Innocence by WILLIAM WILSON
Steel & Ballast by Markella Kara
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Our Past and Our Memories
Forgiveness: A Novel centers around a seventy-year-old artist who finds herself revisiting the defining moments of her life—memories shaped by love, loss, and difficult moral choices. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
After I wrote What a Trip, the prequel to Forgiveness, I couldn’t stop wondering what happened to Fiona after the book’s ending. I missed her and wanted to learn more. With an abundance of time on my hands during the latter part of the Pandemic, Fiona began speaking to me, telling me her story and how the present and past had shaped her life.
I also wanted to explore and contrast the social and political climates of the 1970s with those of today. What better way to do that than with my favorite protagonist?
Fiona spends much of the novel reconsidering choices she made decades earlier. What interested you about the process of looking back on one’s younger self?
We are nothing without our past and our memories. As important as it is to “live in the moment,” those moments are a product of the infinitesimal choices we make each day.
Fiona achieved success in her life, but at a great personal cost. The fiftieth anniversary of her friend’s death, coupled with the Pandemic and her husband’s injury, helped her come to terms with the finite quality of life.
No one gets to age seventy without regrets, but what’s most important is how we handle them. I’ve come to believe forgiveness is freedom. I’m sure Fiona came to that realization also.
The Vietnam War, the draft, women’s rights, COVID-19, and January 6 all shape Fiona’s life. Why was it important to connect personal experiences with larger historical events?
We are all shaped by the times in which we live. History is more than dates, wars, and public figures. It’s how those events affect every aspect of our lives, from the food we eat to our cultural and personal beliefs.
The Vietnam War and the draft affected all young men of that era and their families. Many lost their lives; others like Fiona’s husband, Reuben, stood up for their anti-war beliefs and emigrated to Canada. Had Fiona not been influenced by the women’s rights movement, she wouldn’t have had the courage to follow him.
COVID-19 changed our culture and our lifestyles more than any event in the last seventy-five years. Life suddenly became more fragile, and the time we spent in isolation gave us time to reflect on our past and current way of living. Fiona spent that time coming to terms with her personal history and forgiving herself for events long gone.
Images from the January 6 Insurrection will stay with us forever. The democracy we’ve taken for granted could disappear if we don’t stand up for our rights and freedom. Fiona and her husband were personally affected by the event.
While writing Forgiveness, I asked myself whether the Vietnam War era or the present was more politically charged, more dangerous. Sadly, I feel we have more to fear today.
If Fiona could offer one lesson to readers about regret and renewal, what would it be?
We can’t change the past; we can only change how we view it. Life is too short to live with regret. Fiona’s art helped her come to terms with forgiving herself and her loved ones. For those of us who don’t have a creative outlet, we can journal, meditate, seek counseling, or share our stories with loved ones.
Renewal can happen at any time, at any age.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Facebook | Website | Amazon
On New Year’s Eve 2020, as political unrest erupts in Washington, D.C., seventy-year-old Fiona Goldberg confronts a reckoning far closer to home.
When her husband, Reuben—a journalist covering the January 6 Insurrection—is injured, Fiona is left alone with the past she has spent decades trying to quiet. The memories return in fragments: the Vietnam War protests that first bound them together, a fatal accident that shaped her youth, an affair that nearly destroyed their marriage, and a secret she has carried in silence for nearly half a century.
As Fiona revisits the choices that defined her life—love, betrayal, ambition, motherhood denied—she begins to question the stories we tell ourselves about loyalty, aging, and redemption. Against a backdrop of American political upheaval, Forgiveness explores the intimate terrain of a long marriage and the fragile architecture of memory.
A continuation of the story begun in What a Trip, this literary novel examines what it means to grow older with someone who knows your deepest failures—and whether true forgiveness is ever complete.
For readers of thoughtful, character-driven literary women’s fiction, Forgiveness is a meditation on regret, resilience, and the courage to confront the truths that shape us.
Forgiveness: A Novel
Susen Edwards’s Forgiveness is a contemporary women’s fiction novel centered on Fiona O’Brien, a seventy-year-old artist whose memories of love, loss, and moral compromise resurface during the first days of 2021. The novel begins fifty years after Fiona survived the New Year’s Eve collision that killed her best friend, Melissa. As she plans a series of paintings about forgiveness, she revisits her decision to follow her anti-war activist boyfriend, Reuben Goldberg, to Canada during the Vietnam War. Their years in Toronto, later separation, eventual marriage, and present-day life in Greenwich Village form an expansive portrait of a relationship shaped by both devotion and secrecy.
Edwards structures the story through frequent movement between the early 1970s and the politically unsettled winter of 2020–21. Fiona’s recollections reveal her estrangement from her parents, her difficulty establishing an identity apart from Reuben, an affair, an abortion she conceals, and the professional ambitions that give her an independent sense of purpose. The historical settings are more than scenery. The Vietnam draft, changing attitudes toward women’s health, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the January 6 attack on the Capitol all reinforce the novel’s interest in how private lives are altered by public events. Fiona’s conviction that “I’m a survivor” captures the resolve that carries her through repeated periods of displacement and reinvention.
The novel’s greatest strength is its sustained attention to an older woman examining her life with unusual candor. Fiona’s art provides a persuasive organizing metaphor, since each planned work requires her to transform an experience rather than simply remember it. Her reflections also give forgiveness a demanding definition. It involves recognizing responsibility, releasing blame for events beyond one’s control, and accepting that love can coexist with serious failures. The therapist’s observation that “We’re all human and fallible” becomes central to Fiona’s gradual willingness to extend compassion to her parents, Reuben, and herself. Edwards’s direct prose and conversational dialogue keep these ideas accessible, while Fiona’s self-questioning gives the narrative emotional continuity across its long time span.
The novel delves deep into Fiona’s feelings and historical circumstances, and its many flashbacks slow the momentum of the present-day plot. Yet the deliberate pace also suits a story about a woman sorting through half a century of experience. The later chapters deepen the marriage by allowing Fiona and Reuben to disclose what each has carried silently, making their reconciliation feel grounded in knowledge rather than sentiment alone. Forgiveness is an emotionally open account of aging, artistic self-examination, and a partnership that survives because its participants finally confront the full complexity of their shared past.
Pages: 378 | ASIN : B0GX2Z38G5
The Last Pirouette: A Novel in Three Acts
Janette DeFelice’s The Last Pirouette is a psychologically charged work of contemporary women’s fiction and family drama set inside the demanding world of professional ballet. The story centers on Victoria, a former dancer who has poured her abandoned ambitions into her gifted teenage daughter, Delia. When Delia earns a prestigious opportunity in New York, what looks like a career breakthrough exposes a deeper struggle over identity, control, and the difficult boundary between devotion and possession. The novel’s theatrical structure, presented as a story in three acts, fits its preoccupation with performance, fate, and the roles people play for one another.
The mother-daughter relationship gives this ballet novel its emotional force. Victoria can be intrusive and frustrating, but DeFelice lets us see the grief, trauma, thwarted ambition, and genuine love beneath her behavior. Delia is just as carefully drawn. She loves the physical and artistic experience of dance, yet she’s unsure whether the life built around it belongs to her. That tension makes the book more than a familiar coming-of-age story. It becomes a sharp examination of how a parent’s sacrifices can turn into debts a child never agreed to repay, and how hard it can be to separate your own desires from the expectations that shaped you.
DeFelice’s background in dance is evident in the detailed descriptions of technique, rehearsal, injury, and the strange combination of pain and transcendence that ballet demands. Readers who enjoy dance fiction, psychological fiction, and mother-daughter novels will find plenty to absorb here. The recurring birds, rain, mirrors, wings, and prophetic visions give the narrative a dreamlike, sometimes surreal quality, while the alternating timelines show how unresolved experiences repeat themselves across generations. Some passages linger over physical sensation and interior thought, but that intensity suits characters who understand their lives through movement and through bodies that are constantly being trained, judged, desired, and pushed past their limits.
As the novel grows darker, its early sense of possibility becomes increasingly uneasy, and the closing act carries the momentum of a tragedy whose warning signs have been visible all along. Even so, The Last Pirouette remains deeply interested in choice, autonomy, love, and the question of whether people can stop handing their pain to the next generation. It’s an emotionally demanding literary family drama with a vivid ballet setting, complicated women, and a theatrical sensibility that makes every revelation feel as though it’s happening under stage lights. The result is unsettling, intimate, and likely to stay with readers who appreciate character-driven fiction that doesn’t look away from the damage people can do while believing they’re acting out of love.
Pages: 328 | ASIN : B0FWZX8Z64
This Case And My Life
This Case and My Life by Ana Braunstein is a fast-moving domestic drama about infidelity, deception, and the consequences that arrive when a carefully managed double life falls apart. Chris Roberts is a successful attorney who believes he can control every situation, including his marriage to Stacey and his relationship with Bridget. In the course of one turbulent day, Stacey files for divorce, Bridget reveals that she’s pregnant, and Chris is forced to confront how little control he actually has. The story follows the emotional fallout from several perspectives, which gives the reader a broader view of the damage his choices have caused.
The book has a strongly cinematic quality, which makes sense given that it’s based on a film. Scenes are built around phone calls, entrances, confrontations, revealing pauses, and memorable visual details. The red roses are especially effective. Chris buys them for Bridget, tries to offer them to Stacey, and accidentally proves how little attention he has paid to the woman he’s asking to forgive him. The short lines and quick shifts create the feeling of watching a screen drama unfold, and the chapters keep the pressure on Chris as each new development narrows his options.
What gives the story its emotional substance is the way it treats the women around Chris as people with paths of their own. Stacey’s journey from suspicion and heartbreak to independence becomes the book’s most satisfying arc. Her decision to close the door on Chris feels like both a literal action and a statement about the life she’s ready to leave behind. Kathy, Chris’s assistant, also begins setting boundaries after years of covering for him, while Bridget faces a future built on love, hope, and unresolved complications. Their experiences turn the story into more than an account of a cheating husband getting caught. It becomes a look at how people reclaim their voices after spending too long adjusting themselves to someone else’s behavior.
I’d recommend This Case and My Life most to readers who enjoy relationship dramas, emotionally direct storytelling, and stories about rebuilding after betrayal. It’ll also appeal to viewers who like film-style pacing and want a book they can move through quickly, with clear conflicts and dramatic turning points. Readers who have experienced divorce, major life changes, or the process of starting over may connect especially strongly with Stacey’s growing sense of peace. The book is about consequences, self-respect, and the fact that life continues even when the future looks completely different from the one a person had planned.
Pages: 64 | ASIN: B0GZ6DVDVB
