This haunting story of unlikely friendship begins in 1973, when the ebbing shadow of Vietnam was radically dividing America and domestic violence went largely unchallenged. Gabrielle Bissonette, a graduate student and hunter, returns to her childhood home in the Michigan wilderness and finds herself caught in a web of violence with her brother, a Vietnam vet just released from prison, and his hippie wife. It is not until a decade later that she begins to confront these painful memories in a quest for reconciliation between the past and the woman who emerged from its shadows.

Difficulty unlooked for. Loss unforeseen. Hope forever. They'd never heard about the darker sides of adoption. Never counted on illness. Or loss. As for Dann, his head had always ruled his heart. Now Lily was dying, and he was about to find out just how little he knew about love. Dann Robert Johnson's humor and acute honesty hurtle the reader through a memoir that reads like fiction but shines with hope for the times real life deals us its worst. It's for adoptive families. It's for those who have lived cross-culturally. But more than anything it may be a story for adoptees who wonder if someone could have loved them before they came home. It's the story of a flawless Lily in the darkest valley. "This gut-wrenching struggle through the mysterious strains of deepest love arrested me. It's no fairy-tale version of a princess in a castle." Dr. Ken Castor, adoptive father, 2002, and contributing editor for the Jesus Centered Bible.

Twenty years after his father is murdered outside a rundown motel near their ruined Ohio mill town, college dropout Dalton Hartwell leads a quiet life of denial and repressed rage. He spends his days working as an on-call maintenance man for an apartment complex, where he lives and cares for his dying mother. But when a letter arrives one day, notifying him that Andrew Lareaux, the man who killed his father when he was just a boy, has been paroled from prison, it sets Dalton on an obsessive, uncertain journey in pursuit of the truth surrounding the tragic event. Meanwhile, as Lareaux prepares for his release and tries to mend his fractured relationship with his estranged daughter, Ellie, he finds himself bound by blood to a vicious criminal organization, who plans to collect on his debt in unforeseen ways. As the lives of these three characters converge and become entangled, a current of deception and despair pull them toward a violent confrontation, from which their only hope of escape is to join together in a desperate fight for survival. Set amidst the blight and devastation of the American Rust Belt, Undone Valley is a grim, gritty novel about the secrets of the past, how they shape and direct the course of our lives, and the brutal truths that are better left buried. "In Undone Valley, William R. Soldan achieves a thoughtful balance of the raw and dirty reality of poverty, addiction, and incarceration, with the tenacity and hope of his unforgettable characters. The result of this careful equilibrium is a heartbreaking story of the power of time to heal, but also to fester and stoke. I left this novel feeling like I actually knew these people, and this place, and for me there is no higher praise. Soldan is a master craftsman." -Meagan Lucas, author of Songbirds and Stray Dogs "William R. Soldan's debut novel is full throttle brutal grit, dark thrills, and wild truths. A lot of writers have taken on rustbelt noir, the dying Ohio, but Soldan understands the place like no other. He's come into his own with his latest book, a modern gut punch. He understands the graveyards of buildings. The promises lost in their shattered glass, and the whispers of lives long lost in the growing, brittle, grass that engulfs them. Soldan inhabits this rag-tag collection of characters that take you on a savage journey through the Undone Valley." -Frank Reardon, author of Nirvana Haymaker and Loud Love on the Sevens and Elevens "William R. Soldan does what very few writers are able to do: he writes about ugly realities in a way that's not just skillful, but brutally beautiful, leaving the reader breathless. Undone Valley is a blazing testament to that very fact." -Stephen J. Golds, author of Say Goodbye When I'm Gone and Always the Dead "So much crime writing and Grit Lit seems bent on showing off just how tough and mean and lowdown it is. But William R. Soldan's Undone Valley doesn't need to show off. It comes by its grit naturally, with a flinty grace that permeates this beautiful, festering novel right up through its apocalyptic climax. When it comes to true grit, Soldan is the real deal." -Joey R. Poole, author of I Have Always Been Here Before

From the author of The Great Glass Sea, three linked novellas set between the Virginias about men confronting love, loss, and personal demons. Set in the hardscrabble hill country between the Virginias, The New Valley contains characters striving to forge new lives in the absence of those they have loved. Told in three varied and distinct voices—a soft-spoken middle-aged beef farmer struggling to hold himself together after his dad’s death; a health-obsessed single father desperate to control his reckless, overweight daughter; and a developmentally delayed man who falls in love with a married woman intent on using him in a scheme that will wound them both—each story explores survival, isolation, and the deep, consuming ache for human connection. As the men battle against grief and solitude, their heartache leads them all to commit acts that will bring both ruin and salvation, in these tales “full of tenderness and looming menace” (The New York Times Book Review). “Stark and haunting . . . Delivers great beauty” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “[Weil’s] language is exquisite, his sentences glorious. . . . Refreshing and engaging.” —Ploughshares

This is the story of young girl from Tanzania. Her struggles through life. She started out wanting to be a nun. But her experience with nuns who runs the college put her off. A poor young girl goes to college away from home, left to fend for herself. Through hardiship and traumatic life, how the young beautiful woman struggles against male domination.