Unbridled Books: 96 books

Young Tessa is a diminutive girl, far too small for farm work and the object of ridicule by both her own family and the other children in their isolated Midwestern community. Her father seems to believe in nothing beyond his crops, certainly not education for his misfit daughter. When a mysterious, entrancing...

During the dangerous summer of 1937, a newly widowed American missionary finds herself and her teenage son caught up in the midst of a Japanese invasion of North China and the simultaneous rise of Communism. Meanwhile a charismatic Red Army officer requests her help and seems to have shared some surprising...

John Bonner is sure that anytime now he will recover from the sting of his recent separation from his wife. And he’s begun to wonder if he truly wants to spend the rest of his days running the family scrap-metal business, an operation where his employees are likely to have made the very license plates...

ust as she did in her New York Times Notable debut novel, The Metal Shredders, Nancy Zafris follows a colorful cast of characters into uncharted fictional territory, this time landing in the canyon country of the desert Southwest in 1954. For motivations as straightforward as striking it rich to reasons...

The fourth of Candida Lawrence’s stand-alonememoirs, the collection of pieces that is Vanishingreveals a life-long awareness of human fragility andthe constant proximity of alienation and separation.A survivor in the truest sense and a woman withthe greatest personal resilience, Candida Lawrencerecalls...

In 1961, when Amazing Grace Jansen, a firecracker from Appalachia, meets Mary Elizabeth Cox, the daughter of a Black southern preacher, at Kentucky’s Berea College, they already carry the scars and traces of their mothers’ troubles. Poor and single, Maze’s mother has had to raise her daughter...

Tom Johnson has turned 85 and has suffered a few “events,” though he knows his mind is sharp. His oldest son, who had Down Syndrome has died, and his remaining two children want to move him out of the homestead lake house and into a retirement home in town. What Tom wants to do is to find the only...

The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire is a sweeping historical novel of Mexico during the short, tragic, at times surreal, reign of Emperor Maximilian and his court. Even as the American Civil War raged north of the border, a clique of Mexican conservative exiles and clergy convinced Louis Napoleon to...

By some incalculable force of human attraction, Alan Krieger has two lovers.A man of his girth and compulsion, a man who cannot stop talking and who believes the world to be completely irrational, should not take one companion for granted, much less two. Women who can tolerate his anger, his obsessions,...

In light of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan, the remarkable personal story that comprises Fear Itself becomes a cautionary tale.Unwittingly exposed to low-level radiation in the 1940s, Candida Lawrence has lived courageously with its effects throughout her life. Fear...

In 1899, the streets of New York were as unsettled as the heart and mind of Mary Jane Elmer. The ideas of the transcendentalists were still in the air, and thoughts of a second revolution were rising. Emma Goldman spoke to ever-growing numbers of the disenfranchised in Union Square and scandalized the...

A failed erotic novelist; a hostess of prim sex-toy parties; an artist and a bookshop owner pursued by a demented if harmless stalker; wives, lovers, twin sisters, daughters-all members of the artsy crowd in Omaha, try to hold their families, friendships and personal lives together as they face damaged...

The Wonder Singer is an operatic literary caper about one young writer's manic ambition. The ghostwriter's best chance at fame almost disappears when his Diva dies suddenly in her bath. His solution is to steal the tapes, liberate the Diva's aging husband, and write the autobiography on the run.

The Detective’s Garden: A Love Story and Meditation on Murder is set in Brooklyn in 1995. Originally from Slovenia, ex-NYPD Homicide Detective Emil Milosec, a man with a past poised to reclaim him is perennially on the outside. Elena, his beauty of a wife, has died, but she has filled pages of letters...