WINNER OF THE 2026 THOMAS E. KENNEDY NOVEL AWARD:

Sel, an eighty-year-old former marine recovering from a broken hip in Shady Shores nursing home deep in the heat of Florida, wants to return to his childhood home in Ohio, but his hip and son are preventing him from going anywhere. Feather, an eighteen-year-old nursing assistant and orphan, longs to escape the nursing home, and go to Minnesota where she dreams of finding her family, but she has no money, no transportation, and lives with an abusive cop who has threatened her if she ever tries to leave. Sel’s focused on the past. Feather’s focused on the future. One motorcycle, one broken hip, and one determined teenager. What could possibly go wrong?

Author: Roger Hart

Paperback: 272 pages
ISBN: 9781972482247

WINNER OF THE 2025 THOMAS E. KENNEDY NOVEL AWARD

Author: Susan Forrest Castle
248 pages, 2025
Literature | Novel
ISBN: Paperback: 9781947175952 / Hardcover: 9781947175891

Swimming in a secluded lake near her Georgia home, 40-something waitress Phoebe is startled by a figure watching her from the shore. When she exits the water, nearly blind without her glasses, the stranger wrestles her to the stony ground and assaults her.

Hundreds of miles north, family man and successful attorney George Paxton pauses in the midst of mowing his lawn to stretch out on the grass. Staring up into the vast blue sky he sees a dirigible float by overhead––a sight so inexplicably stirring, George vows to ply the skies in such a craft himself––consequences be damned.

Ensoulment follows Phoebe as she juggles low paid work and an unforeseen pregnancy, and George as his obsession with airships compels him to abandon his marriage and lucrative career. Each shed the lives they have known to embrace the souls they were born to be, drawing toward each other in the process––in spirit and, ultimately, in fact, when George, aloft in his dirigible, is brought down to earth—and into Phoebe’s world—by a raging storm.