Books published by Brighthorse Books

The year is 1996. A principled and spirited woman sets her sights on becoming a member of Parliament. When and how does she get there? The story unfolds through the perspectives of two dramatically contrasting characters whose lives become tragically entangled. Waheeda is a thirty-two-year-old woman from Uttar Pradesh who enters politics after her brothers are murdered. Monish, her secret lover, is a scion of a Delhi business dynasty, who is trapped in his bullying father’s empire. Their affair is set against the backdrop of a tumultuous time in politics--tumbling governments and three national elections taking place over three years. Their personal and public lives clash as they struggle to achieve their goals: power for her; fortune for him; unaware of the dangers that swirl around them. Everything is interconnected, not just wealth and politics, even if the characters are not fully cognisant of this.

Look. A woman is writing on parchment, a scroll.*We don't know her name. Her king, Solomon, hasdied, and the whole country's going to hell under thenew king, Rehoboam. The year is 937 BCE. Banishedfrom the ring of political power, she grounds herselfby collecting the kingdom's ancient stories. Of thefour writers in Genesis, J is the one who deliversthe earthly creatures-Noah, Joseph, Jacob, Rachel,et al-and, to paraphrase Pogo, they is us. Her castof characters includes the god Yahweh (or Jahweh)who can appear in various guises. She's named J forher intense interest in Yahweh's character.

It's 1923 and Annie O'Leary has made a rational and even beautiful life for herself on the back ward of a state asylum, where she's confined for a terrible crime she doesn't remember committing. She writes poetry, helps the nurses, and sings old hymns off the back porch. Then a new patient arrives to change all the equations. Lucy Valenta, a young art student, needs to get back in her right mind and bring her enormous gift into the world. The bond between the two women is deep and quick with hope: of making family, of making art, and forming a pact of transformation. The enigmatic psychiatrist, Dr. David Grafton, wants to help Annie retrieve her history, invoking the new techniques of psychoanalysis-but he himself is a wounded healer, traumatized by his recent experience of trench warfare. Each must hold in tension the power of memory to liberate and destroy. Each must dare the millrace of-- call it-- love.

The Collector of Shadows, by James Silas Rogers, is a collection of poetry set primarily in the upper Midwest and celebrating the extraordinary in the ordinary. Rogers, an award-winning essayist and well-published poet, is the author of a chapbook, Sundogs, and of a collection of essays and poems involving cemeteries, Northern Orchards: Places Near the Dead.

Suburban Heathens follows the trajectory of parallel and converging catastrophes that begin with the AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s and the protagonist's best friend's death, and continue with her father's struggle with heart disease, actually made worse by medical interventions witnessed by the wandering lesbian daughter who is called home to a Jewish enclave in the suburbs of Shawnee Mission, Kansas, where she grew up-halfway between the Shawnee Indian Mission and the Osawatomie State Mental Hospital. The hospital melodrama brings to light the family history of displacement and immigration, heart disease (literal and metaphoric), cancer, death, struggle, and loss as well as recovery and regeneration as Rickie Lynn Jackson finds her relatives in Rochester, New York's famous Mount Hope Cemetery.

In the Amber Chamber is a story collection where fairy tales and speculative fiction intersect with the hard facts of eastern European history. These political fables take place in eastern Europe, Kansas, and even other planets. Its characters include Peace Corps volunteers, childless parents, Hansel and Gretel, former rural farmworkers, Dust Bowl survivors, and immigrants in Chicago. Like the work of Kelly Link and Angela Carter, In the Amber Chamber reframe our understanding of story.

How I Met You is a wide-ranging collection of award-winning short stories by the celebrated fiction writer Bradley Jay Owens that includes heartfelt stories about coming of age, side-splitting stories about relationships, and penetrating stories about the human drama.

A collection of short fiction by the award-winning writer Alina Stefanescu in which the author brings an immigrant's sharp eye to the American way of life. In prose that reminds us of the best of Grace Paley, Every Mask I Tried On is by turns smart, funny, and profound.