Books We Loved, Aug. 2026

With August in full swing and the end of summer closing in, there are so many ways to spend the time. Yet reading never fails to entertain. As usual, we present three books we love to keep you turning pages, whether real or virtual. And for those historical fiction buffs amongst you, not only are two of the three listed books in that genre, but Five Directions Press also has a new title of our own to announce: Song of the Silk Weaver, the latest in C. P. Lesley’s Songs of Steppe & Forest series, is already available for preorder on Kindle and will appear both there and in print on September 15. You can find out more about it from the book page. Tatar women with attitude and sexy Italian merchants—what more need we say?

Rhys Bowen, The Castle in the Glen  (Lake Union Publishing, 2026)

I love Rhys Bowen’s historical mystery series, especially Her Royal Spyness books, which feature Lady Georgiana Rannoch. The Castle in the Glen, in contrast, appears to be a standalone, although there’s room for it to develop into a series if the author so decides.

The novel opens with an excerpt from The Wild Girl, a work-in-progress by an acclaimed mystery writer, Iris Blackburn (to quote from the Cast of Characters, “Think Agatha Christie”). Set on the Isle of Skye, off Scotland’s western coast, The Wild Girl purports to be the first case of Iris Blackburn’s pet detective, Inspector Melrose. But Iris, who’s approaching eighty and suffering from impending dementia, hires a young Australian named Emma Callander, whose first book recently appeared in London to great acclaim, to finish the novel.

To secure Emma’s agreement, Iris offers an all-expenses-paid trip to Skye, where Emma can absorb the atmosphere, appreciate the setting, and connect with the character of Inspector Melrose before sitting down to write. Only after Emma reaches the island does she begin to suspect that the fictional mystery may not be fiction after all.

Bowen juggles the three historical timelines—1904, the time of the original deaths; 1932, when Iris visited Skye; and Emma/Iris in 1965—with her usual aplomb. She also leaps nimbly between the novel and the novel-within-the-novel, which Emma reads so that she can get a sense of what the book needs and how she can contribute to finishing Iris’s story.  The result is a delightful tale that never takes itself too seriously yet kept me turning pages to the end.

And if you’ve never visited Skye yourself, it really is exactly as described. That I have such vivid and fond memories of my short time there just added to my appreciation of the novel.—CPL

Elizabeth Letts, Fallen for France  (Bantam Books, 2026)

This remarkable novel explores, within the context of World War I, several issues that have so far received little attention and does so from a number of competing points of view. The action centers on a horse—a particularly beautiful Arabian mare born in the stable of the Sultan of Morocco in 1905—and the various people who claim ownership of her over the years. These include a Moroccan shepherd boy, Beddou; Omar, the head groom who assists the mare’s birth; Jean-Baptiste Thibault, a giant of a man with OCD (the result of childhood abuse, which Beddou also suffers with different results); Hassan, the man who rescues Beddou from the boy’s vicious uncle but then flees to Europe, taking the horse with him; and the central couple of Estelle Maillot, a Frenchwoman living on a rural farm under German attack, and Thomas Bellows, an English veterinarian in charge of providing care to cavalry horses wounded in battle.

While diving deep into the psychology of and interactions among this overlapping cast of characters, Letts explores questions of power, belonging, family, mistreatment, and healing. In so doing, she casts a new light not only on World War I itself—including the often-ignored involvement of cavalry forces, especially early in the war—but on colonialism, in this case French, and its effect on both colonized and colonizers. And she does so while creating a gripping, fast-moving tale. The ending is perhaps the best part, because it shows us what happens to the various central characters, but I won’t spoil the experience for you by revealing any of that here.—CPL

Linda K. Sienkiewicz, Love and Other Incurable Ailments

(Regal House Publishing, October, 2026—available for preorder now)

Michigander Serenity Tomczyk is a twenty-eight-year-old anxiety-ridden, self-deprecating, hypochondriac with an unbridled impulsive streak. She’s also very lonely. She lost her dad before she even had a chance to realize he did in fact love her; she lost her mom not long after to cancer; her fiancé turned out to be a loser of the first degree, and her beloved cat is on his way out in the early chapters of the book. What Serenity has left is her Aunt Gloria, her job working in Gloria’s home décor shop (where the buzzing of the fluorescent lights makes Serenity think she has a heart arrhythmia) and a weekly therapy group. Not much of a life, so naturally when she sees a red-haired woman drive up and drop a box into the shop’s private dumpster, she is at first incensed (the act is illegal) and then curious. Her curiosity escalates when she learns the contents of the box include love letters—written by a brokenhearted man who lives on the island of Ocracoke, NC, to a woman called Cassandra who lives there in Michigan, undoubtedly the box dumper. Serenity’s acquisition of the love letters—and the dramatic exploits they conjure in her mind—becomes the catalyst for her belief in the possibility of reinventing herself, and she decides to move to Ocracoke.

For readers who have never been there, Ocracoke is totally unique, and author Sienkiewicz illuminates its many charms with loving precision. But if Serenity is to be there for any length of time, she will have to make adjustments to her apprehensive nature. There is no hospital on Ocracoke—a nightmare for a health-obsessive neurotic. And the cottage she decides to put a deposit on (sight unseen, before she even leaves Michigan) is in a state of disrepair, and, according to just about everyone, haunted to boot. The saving grace for her is that the tight-knit villagers are all so anxious to understand why such an “odd duck” would upend her entire life to move to their island that any fear of being isolated is quickly eliminated.

Sienkiewicz is a master when it comes to creating character through both description and dialogue—babies, children, and adults alike are all well drawn and a pleasure to encounter at Serenity’s side. These are people who go to Fig Festivals and Pirate Jamborees instead of movies or malls. These are people used to knowing everyone else’s business, and perhaps that makes them more accepting of other people’s quirks.

As in A Man Called Ove, Love and Other Incurable Ailments features an eccentric protagonist and a quirky community in which to explore the transformative power of human connection. But unlike Ove, who is initially cranky, Serenity is appealing from the get-go—vulnerable, hopeful, and often laugh-out-loud funny. The result is a heartwarming novel about grief, courage, and the possibility of creating a new life when the old one no longer fits.—JS