Blog Archives
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.
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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
Foxy Lady
Foxy Lady by Allie McCormack is a warm, character-driven paranormal romance centered on Harper O’Neill, a fox shapeshifter whose quiet life is shattered after her transformation is caught on camera during a rescue in Yosemite. Forced to leave San Francisco, Harper relocates to New York’s Hudson Valley and finds shelter within a thriving supernatural community. The novel blends shapeshifter romance, urban fantasy romance, and cozy paranormal fantasy, creating a world filled with witches, Djinn, magical innkeepers, brownies, pixies, and even a rescued jackalope.
Harper’s emotional journey gives the story its heart. She begins the book frightened, guarded, and accustomed to making herself small, but gradually becomes more confident as Katerina, Becca, and the rest of the community welcome her into their lives. The found-family theme is especially strong, and the friendships receive nearly as much attention as the central romance. Because the book spends plenty of time on shared meals, casual conversations, music, work, and everyday magical details, Harper’s new life feels lived-in rather than simply described.
Her relationship with Nathan develops with patience and tenderness. Their shared love of music gives them an immediate connection, while Nathan’s calm acceptance of Harper’s human and fox sides allows trust to grow naturally. This is a gentle magical shapeshifter romance, so much of the appeal comes from emotional safety, domestic moments, affectionate teasing, and the pleasure of watching two thoughtful people build a life together. Nathan’s bond with Jill, the jackalope in his care, also reveals his nurturing personality without relying on lengthy explanations.
The novel balances its comforting atmosphere with several outside pressures, including workplace bullying, invasive media attention, and the public debate surrounding newly revealed shapeshifters. Some sections move at an unhurried pace, particularly when the wider ensemble takes center stage, but that approach suits the book’s community-focused style. Readers who enjoy cozy paranormal romance, fox shifter romance, supernatural found-family stories, and low-angst relationships will find Foxy Lady an inviting, affectionate read with a generous amount of magic and heart.
Pages: 402 | ASIN: 1955716285
Your Tomorrow Was Today
Oyindamola Dosunmu’s Your Tomorrow Was Today is a contemporary Nigerian literary fiction novel about two estranged sisters shaped by family duty, buried trauma, and competing ideas of what a woman owes the people around her. In present-day Lagos, successful corporate professional Karen Ezeani is forced to confront her past after her mother dies. The story then moves between Karen’s life in 2024 and her family’s experiences in Awka beginning in 2010, gradually revealing why she abandoned her birth name, Adesuwa, and cut herself off from those closest to her. It’s an emotionally direct work of feminist fiction, African women’s fiction, and family drama that asks what healing looks like when silence has protected everyone except the person who was harmed.
Karen and her older sister, Omo, provide the novel’s emotional center. Omo has spent years believing that a good woman must endure hardship to preserve her marriage and family, even when that endurance comes at a terrible cost. Karen builds a life around independence, achievement, and control, but professional success can’t fully protect her from grief or memories she’s tried to bury. The title’s meaning comes into focus when Uloma tells Omo, “Your tomorrow should have been today; it should have been that instant.” That line captures the novel’s central concern with postponed decisions. Again and again, the women are encouraged to wait, tolerate, forgive, or sacrifice, while the damage caused by that waiting grows.
Dosunmu gives the book a broad social canvas without losing sight of its characters. Karen’s complicated relationship with Tunde explores love, ambition, pregnancy, and the limits of understanding between two people who imagine their future differently. Stephanie’s feelings for Tunde add workplace tension, while Uloma becomes an important witness to the family’s history and a voice willing to challenge its long-held excuses. The novel also draws attention to the expectations placed on firstborn daughters, the protection of abusive men, reproductive autonomy, religious hypocrisy, and the pressure on Nigerian women to measure their worth through marriage and motherhood. These subjects emerge through arguments, memories, office politics, family gatherings, and support-group conversations, giving the book the feel of an intimate family story connected to a much larger cultural discussion.
Readers of Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s Stay with Me may recognize a similar interest in how marriage, fertility, family interference, and social expectations shape women’s private lives. Both books are rooted in Nigeria and examine the consequences of choices made under pressure, though Your Tomorrow Was Today places greater emphasis on sisterhood, sexual trauma, workplace ambition, and a woman’s right to define fulfillment for herself. Its shifting timeline allows revelations to arrive gradually, and its Lagos and Awka settings create a vivid contrast between Karen’s polished professional world and the family history she carries into it. The narration is often reflective, making the book especially suited to readers who enjoy character-driven stories that spend time examining why people make painful or contradictory choices.
The target audience includes adult readers of contemporary African literature, Nigerian fiction, feminist literary fiction, women’s fiction, and book-club novels about trauma, family relationships, and personal agency. Because the story deals frankly with sexual assault, domestic abuse, pregnancy loss, abortion, and depression, readers should approach it with those themes in mind. What makes Your Tomorrow Was Today memorable is its understanding that choosing yourself doesn’t erase grief, restore lost years, or make every relationship repairable. Instead, the novel presents healing as the difficult work of speaking honestly, accepting support, setting boundaries, and deciding that tomorrow can’t remain an excuse for postponing your own life.
Pages: 380 | ASIN: B0G6SWMBQ5
A Flower from Keanu: A Town of Hidden Glen Novella
A Flower from Keanu by Maria Elena Alonso-Sierra is a small-town romantic suspense novella set in Hidden Glen, where florist Cassandra Finlay is trying to rebuild herself after grief, abandonment, and years of quiet endurance. When Keanu Rivers returns home from Manhattan to renovate an old estate and begin a new chapter as a chef and business owner, his reappearance stirs old memories, new desire, and the town’s many buried secrets. Their romance blooms against a backdrop of family wounds, land-development pressure, local gossip, and the rare Christmas flower whose legend suggests that fortune may shift when hope seems nearly spent.
I was most drawn to Cassandra, a woman written with bruises rather than brittleness. She isn’t merely “strong” in the easy, decorative sense; she’s tired, capable, wary, and sometimes sharp because life has taught her to keep a blade within reach. Her flower shop, The Smiling Peony, feels like an extension of her character, rooted, overworked, beautiful despite the weather. Keanu, meanwhile, brings warmth without becoming bland. His steadiness has flavor: food, family, renovation dust, practical devotion. Their chemistry works because it grows out of recognition, not instant convenience.
What gives the novella its texture is the way romance is braided with civic unease. Hidden Glen is charming, but not quaint in a bloodless way; it has gossip, grudges, opportunists, loyal friends, and people who know exactly where everyone’s old scars are hidden. The story sometimes gets dramatic, but that heightened emotion fits the book. It has the heightened pulse of a town where one engagement party can turn into public reckoning and one rare flower can carry the emotional weight of a benediction. The Christmas imagery is especially effective because it doesn’t feel pasted on; it becomes a symbol of renewal that Cassandra has earned, petal by difficult petal.
I think this book is best suited for readers who enjoy small-town romance, romantic suspense, family drama, and women’s fiction. Readers who like the community warmth of Robyn Carr’s Virgin River books, but want a sharper edge of secrets and confrontation, will likely feel at home in Hidden Glen. A Flower from Keanu is a tender, thorned romance about choosing hope after life has made hope feel almost impolite.
Pages: 230 | ASIN: B0H29D213F
