With the second half of 2024 approaching us, we are nearing another season of brand new Sibylline titles, and a handful of new Sibylline authors (Sibyls) to introduce you to! From a memoir of a mother who joins the police academy when raising young twins becomes overwhelming to the narrative of a filmmaker returning to his familial roots in Scotland, there’s bound to be a book from our four title lineup that you’ll fall in love with this fall.
Our Fall 2024 titles are already available for preorder! Snag your copy today at the quick links below (click on the title!), or find them wherever great books are sold!
One Bad Mother by Megan Williams – out September 3rd, 2024
Eleven Stolen Horses by Robin Somers – out September 17th, 2024
Silence by Julia Park Tracey – out September 24th, 2024
Mrs. McPhealy’s American by Claire R. McDougall – out October 1st, 2024
Learn more about our Fall 2024 titles:
One Bad Mother by Megan Williams:
This is a book for every mother who questions herself, has a bad day, or thinks that challenging athletic feats and professional achievements may in fact be easier than being a mother. That is—most of us.
After one of her six-year-old twins puts a hammer through a wall, Megan Williams feels as if she is failing the test that is motherhood. And it’s one she’s been failing ever since her twins were born at twenty-nine weeks. Recognizing a hole in her life that is eerily similar to the space left in the drywall, Williams abandons her academic career to apply to the Police Academy. She needs a win.
Through a grueling two-year application process, Williams confronts her mental and psychological abilities. She runs laps around younger candidates, but she fails her physical because she takes Prozac. Yet another obstacle arises when her mandatory polygraph insists that she is a drug dealer. During it all, Williams measures herself against the other candidates and other mothers with brutal honesty and black humor. She confronts the paralyzing fear that she is a bad mother, as well as the real possibility that she might not make the cut at the Academy. In the end, she makes peace with a motherhood far different from the dream sold by our culture.
About Megan Williams:
Previous to her decision to apply to the Police Department, Megan Williams was a professor of English at various universities for over twenty years. After graduating from Haverford College, Megan received her Ph.D. in English from Temple University and taught at Lafayette College and Santa Clara University. Portions of One Bad Mother have received recognition from the New Millennium Award in Nonfiction, the Cagibi Magazine Prize, Panther Creek Award in Non-Fiction, and William Faulkner Creative Writers’ Competition. Last year, Williams won the PNWA award for nonfiction. She and her family currently reside in Bellingham, Washington.
Eleven Stolen Horses by Robin Somers:
How much does Eleanor Wooley really know about her new best friend?
Eleanor Wooley is determined to start her life over in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. But when her new best friend suddenly disappears, Eleanor abandons her job as a crime reporter for The Gold Strike Tribune and sets off in desperate pursuit.
Spurred by gut instinct, Eleanor soon leaves California and scours Northeastern Nevada during one of the hottest, driest summers on record. Obscure signs appear—an intruder’s dire warning, a casino’s mysterious graffiti, a random sighting of a killer on the run.
In her search to find Rette, Eleanor discovers the dark world of today’s inhumane treatment of wild horses, and when the secrets of her trusted best friend’s past begin to surface, Eleanor finds herself in grave danger. With the backdrop of the American West’s high desert wilderness and its towering, rugged mountains and vast open range, Eleanor is forced to decide if continuing her search for Rette is worth losing her own life.
About Robin Somers:
Robin Somers is the author of Beet Fields, a murder mystery. A founding member of the Coastal Cruisers chapter of Sisters in Crime, she’s an Emerita Lecturer in writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Robin lived in the rural foothill town of Sonora, California, in the nape of the Sierra Nevada, where she kept her horse and worked as a crime reporter for the local newspaper, an editor for the United States Forest Service, and an English teacher. In 2002, she returned to her home near the beach in Santa Cruz, California, where she lives with her husband and their Havanese, Buster. She is a passionate advocate for wild horses.
Silence by Julia Park Tracey:
“I am no witch, nor adulteress, thief, nor murderer. They say I have lost my reason, but I know only that my heart is shattered, and in crying it aloud, now I must pay the cost….”
After three grievous losses, Puritan woman Silence Marsh dares to question God aloud in the church, and that blasphemy lands her in trouble—she is silenced for a year by the powers that govern. Broken in heart and spirit, Silence learns to mime and sign, but it isn’t until a new Boston doctor, the dashing Daniel Greenleaf, comes to her backward Cape Cod village that she begins to hope again. Rather than treating Silence with bleeding or leeches, Dr. Greenleaf prescribes fresh air, St. John’s Wort, long walks—and reading.
Silence has half a hope of getting through her year of punishment when the cry of witchcraft poisons the village. Colonial Massachusetts is still reeling from the Salem Witch Trials just 20 years before. Now, after they’ve demanded her silence, she is called to witness at a witchcraft trial—or be accused herself.
A whiff of sulfur and witchcraft shadows this literary Puritan tale of loss and redemption, based on the author’s own ancestor, her seventh great-grandmother.
About Julia Park Tracey:
Author Julia Park Tracey’s ancestors and their stories have given her a trail to follow from New York and New England to the deep south and the Pacific Coast. The Bereaved: A Novel, the story of her great great grandmother’s loss of her children to the Orphan Train was named in the top 100 indie books published in 2023 by Kirkus Reviews. Christian Kiefer, author of the newly released The Heart of it All, said: “In The Bereaved, Julia Park Tracey reopens America’s wounds in prose that is propulsive and resonant. Theodore Dreiser comes to mind, but so, too, the fine contemporary novels of Jo Baker and Maggie O’Farrell.”
Mrs. McPhealy’s American by Claire R. McDougall
Sometimes a one-way ticket to Scotland gives you more than you’d bargained for.
The entire rural town of Locharbert is abuzz because Hollywood director Steve McNaught is moving in. Putting two failed marriages, three sons, and a drinking problem behind him, he embarks on a quest for the uncomplicated life of his ancestors in the home of his distant relative, Mrs. McPhealy.
But from the start, the newcomer is eyed with suspicion, not least by ex-hippy and local midwife, Georgie. Drawing on his well-honed charm, Steve tries to woo her, and though there is spark, she sends him packing … until she doesn’t. Everything would be on track, if Steve could only lose his tendency to see the world through a camera lens, if only the funny local characters, like the tinkers on the shore or the randy postmistress, weren’t begging to be put on the screen. Georgie warns him against turning her town into a film set, but the die is already cast. He makes matters worse by buying up the dilapidated cottage by the shore where Georgie grew up and which she has always hoped to restore. Rejected and dejected, his drinking back in full swing, he packs up his film reels and returns to California.
And then, months later, in the daft days of Hogmanay, Steve reappears, sober and brandishing his newly edited film. The secret life of Locharbert is about to tumble out.
About Claire R. McDougall:
Claire R. McDougall was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, her family settling in rural Argyll’s wild and rugged countryside, with its ancient ruins and standing stones. She studied philosophy for four years at Edinburgh University. After earning her MA, she spent four years on a Haldane scholarship to gain a Master of Letters at Christ Church, Oxford, studying Nietzsche. After moving to the United States, Claire worked as a journalist, before opting to pursue creative writing full time. She has written eight novels and their attendant screenplays. She is the author of four published books: Veil of Time (Simon and Schuster 2104) Druid Hill, Iona, and Hazel and the Chessmen.