The Quarry Bank Runaways by G J Griffiths

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“Child apprentices in very many cotton mills continued to be treated like slaves well after the Slave Trade Acts of the 19th century.” “Pauper child apprentices from workhouses were not even paid after working 12 hour days and for 5 or 6 days a week, mill owners counted the profit!” In the early 19th century, when it was the policy of many of the poorhouses and workhouses to deter paupers from applying by making the conditions inside harsh and unpleasant, two boys set out on a journey to Hackney Workhouse in London. Their starting point was in the pleasant Cheshire countryside, where they were apprenticed to the cotton mill built by Samuel Greg in 1784. Children as young as 9 would be employed there, as scavengers, piecers, mule doffers or can tenters. These jobs could be just as unpleasant and difficult for a poor child as those we may have heard of, such as chimney sweeps and match girls. Quarry Bank Mill was some 200 miles north of London and the boys had to sneak out unnoticed and then attempt to walk all the way. It was likely that these enterprising travellers took advantage of the drovers’ roads and the newly developed “motorways” of the times – the canals. Perhaps they were lucky enough some days to hitch a lift; their general direction of travel taking them to Beartown, the Potteries, Dunstable Downs and eventually to London. Whatever challenges they encountered along the way archive evidence shows that they made it. Runaway apprentices had become a problem for society during the years of the Industrial Revolution – so what had prompted Thomas and Joseph to do such a hazardous thing? What happened to them on their long journey? Did they receive any help? Or were they chased relentlessly wherever they ran, since what they were doing was illegal in the eyes of the authorities? This is the story of their adventure and it concludes with the events in the Middlesex courthouse, known then as the Old Sessions.

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Death of a Cigarette: A Story of Survival, Memory and Legacy. by Timothy Webber

Death of a Cigarette opens in the present day, at a Midwestern museum where an artifact rests behind glass: a single unlit Lucky Strike cigarette. From there, Chance, the cigarette himself, begins to speak.

He takes us back to the tobacco fields, tended by sisters Eva Mae and Ella Mae, where the journey truly begins. From curing barns to the factory floor, Chance and his siblings are shaped, wrapped by Henri the dignified French paper, and packed for war. By Chapter 4, their voices awaken fully.

The pack crosses the Atlantic into the hands of Philip Martin, a Missouri farm boy preparing for D-Day. On the Channel, tracer arcs stitch the sky. At Omaha Beach, the ramp drops, Sally burns bright, Winston steadies Philip with an unlit benediction, and Chance, riding in Philip’s chest pocket, becomes a quiet talisman of survival.

Inches and breaths define the beach crossing. Afterward, the war opens into hedgerows and aftermath: a harmonica at dusk, a shared apple, unsent letters. When the fighting ends, silence follows Philip home to Missouri, lingering in a drawer only carefully opened.

In 1961, during the Stars and Stripes centennial in Bloomfield, he gives his uniform, and Chance, to the museum, where a modest placard tells almost nothing of their story.

Decades later, in the Epilogue, Philip’s grandson Art encounters the display once more in the present day. Recognition bridges private grief and public memory, completing the circle that began in the Prologue. Chance remains unlit, but not unspent.

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A Woman’s Fight by Sofia Diana Gabel

In this blending of historical fact and fiction, 19th century French feminist writer and speaker Maria Deraismes struggles against misogynistic men and the French government during the turbulent 1870s in Paris. Maria involves herself with the Paris Commune in 1871 and rallies behind the new socialist government believing it will end inequality. Violence erupts when troops break through the barricades on April 2nd and begin a bloody week to overthrow the Commune.

Maria fights for equality and speaks openly for the people, but her words fall on deaf ears. With support from her Masonic friends, she pushes to be initiated into the male-only Order to prove women are no different than men and deserve to stand with them. It’s a dangerous road she walks down but she refuses to give up, clinging to the French motto of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

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Color of Fire by Gina Giordano

“And I thought you were my savior in my darkest hour. How very wrong I was.”
 
1794: Devastated by the violent disappearance of her husband, Charles Sharpe, Eliza struggles to save Pleasant Hall from the hands of crooked creditors and the governor’s greed. In the aftermath of the attack, her husband’s enemies have branded him a traitor and declare him dead.
But an unlikely source carries knowledge that he still lives, and he alone knows who has taken Charles. Eliza’s desperation drives her to form an alliance with the king of the underworld himself: Captain Hiram Bruin, a notorious man who is more pirate than privateer.
Eliza’s death has been ordered by Lord Dunmore, and Bruin himself tasked with the deed. But Hiram Bruin has never been a man to follow orders. He offers her passage on his ship, the Fortuyne, and his personal protection. In her hour of distress, Eliza accepts—for she has no other choice.
Bruin takes Eliza on a dangerous voyage from the island of New Providence to the wild and untamed Saba, and finally to England, where her journey started three years ago.
Eliza endures her new sinister reality, one where death creeps ever closer, and quickly learns that the only monsters at sea are men. Ensnared by the salt air and damning secrets, one thing is startlingly clear: Bruin wants to take everything she holds dear. For the roots of revenge lie deep…
Will Eliza be able to save the life of her husband before it’s too late? What price is she willing to pay for his freedom? And can she escape this unimaginable nightmare, fueled by a man of unspeakable cruelty?
 
Color of Fire is the dark, thrilling conclusion to Gina Giordano’s sweeping historical epic, the STRANGE EDEN Trilogy, and is on sale this weekend only!

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About Featured Book: Living in Cleveland with the Ghost of Joseph Stalin by Marc Sercomb

It’s the summer of 1953. Calvin Jefferson Coolidge is thirteen years old when the ghost of Joseph Stalin appears to him in his Aunt Evelyn’s cluttered Cleveland attic and wants to dictate his memoirs to him.
“I want to tell my side of the story,” Uncle Joe tells him. “They’re giving me one year to set the record straight, so we need to get started right away.”
Calvin’s life is falling apart at the seams. He’s a misfit and loner whose only friends are famous dead people. He loves polka music and Westerns and sometimes wonders what it would be like to kiss a girl. His con man father is in Florida looking for his bipolar runaway mother. His cousin Buck is abducted and experimented on by aliens. The lady next door wants to coach him in the ways of love. His pastor thinks he’s headed straight for Hell. His English teacher thinks he’s a savant. The school psychologist wants to have him committed. His shrink thinks he’s just plain nuts. Sometimes, Calvin believes it too.
Everybody’s trying to figure out what makes Calvin tick in this quirky, fast-paced metaphysical romp through the heart and soul of 1950’s America.

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About Featured Book: Mijo: We Bend, Not Break by Francisco Castillo

Mijo: We Bend, Not Break is a multigenerational family saga that explores the silence, strength, and emotional inheritance passed down through three generations of Mexican American men: Joaquín, Alejandro, and Gabriel Martínez. Set between the hills of Michoacán, Mexico, and the agricultural heartland of Hollister, California, the novel reveals how unspoken lessons of manhood ripple across decades, shaping love, loss, and the fragile hope of change.

The story begins in the late 1970s with Joaquín, a young husband and field laborer who leaves his hometown of Caulcomán, Michoacán, determined to build a better life in America. Hardened by poverty and his father’s emotional distance, Joaquín believes that silence and sacrifice define strength. Alongside his devoted wife, Carmen, he crosses the border and settles in Central California, where the promise of opportunity meets the reality of exhaustion and invisibility.

His quiet determination provides stability but also creates emotional distance that seeps into his home.
Years later, his son Alejandro comes of age in the 1990s, growing up between cultures and expectations. To Joaquín, emotion is weakness; to Alejandro, emotion is survival. Yet despite his yearning to connect, Alejandro internalizes his father’s restraint and carries the same unspoken lessons into adulthood. He falls in love with Elena, a woman who recognizes his tenderness but also senses the walls he cannot lower. When their son Gabriel is born, Alejandro vows to parent differently, but fatherhood exposes the very wounds he has spent his life avoiding.

Through recessions, job insecurity, and shifting generational values, the Martínez men confront what it truly means to be strong. Joaquín’s aging brings regret and quiet recognition of the love he failed to express. Alejandro, now a father himself, struggles to find emotional footing in a world that demands both resilience and vulnerability. Gabriel, growing up in the age of social media and mental health awareness, becomes the bridge between his family’s past and its possible future. His generation speaks the language of healing that his father and grandfather never learned.

When a family crisis forces old resentments and buried pain to surface, the three men begin therapy for the first time. Guided by a marriage and family therapist, they face the unspoken truths that have haunted them for decades. Through tears, resistance, and moments of clarity, each man begins to see that strength is not found in silence but in the courage to feel.

Mijo: We Bend, Not Break is a deeply human novel about fathers and sons, culture and migration, love and repair. It is about how healing rarely begins with words but with the decision to finally be seen.

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Self-Liberation of Parson Sykes: Return to Southampton County by David J. Mason

With a victorious end to the Civil War, Parson Sykes fulfilled the goal of self-liberation, but he grew frustrated with the Reconstruction programs. At the suspension of open hostility, he recognized the need for complete emancipation. Following the defeat of the Confederacy, he must advance civil and human rights to gain real freedom. As post-war planning emerged, new challenges arose. Parson grew frustrated with the connivance practices in racial superiority and inferiority that hindered everyday freedom.
Parson experienced the chaotic end of the Civil War while serving in the Union Army. Grappling with military-civil affairs duty, political uncertainty, and the unfulfilled promises of emancipation, Parson realized the Emancipation Proclamation did not go far enough. Following the defeat of the Confederacy, vicious racial violence characterized the resistance to integrating Black people.
Parson joyously learned that Federal government created the Freedmen’s Bureau to help formerly enslaved people transition to freedom with humanitarian aid. Parson relentlessly advocated and pursued education, political participation, and full citizenship. With the creation of the Bureau, he felt less pressure.
Parson witnesses the final year of the Civil War and the chaotic dawn of Reconstruction, learning about the complex political fight for civil rights from mentors and personal observation. Parson’s insights taught him that in war, the victory is just the blossom, and nothing is more frustrating than a bloom that refuses to morph into some fruit.
Parson returns to Virginia, where he confronts the defeated confederates, including the rise of hate groups and violent insurgents. In Southampton County, the Bureau mediated sharecropping agreements between white landowners and Black families after the constitutional end of enslavement. Despite granting freedom, the federal government took little action to help Black families acquire the promised land.
Through his interactions with mentors, Parson becomes a fierce advocate for the human and civil rights of Black Americans, focusing on education, land ownership, and political participation. He navigated the legal and social struggles surrounding the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, revealing both the hope they inspired and the violent backlash they provoked.
With the passage of these amendments, they guaranteed equal rights for all citizens and prohibited states from denying the right to vote based on race or color. Simply put, Parson’s efforts to gain freedom, citizenship, and equality required long-term commitment, resilience, and perseverance.
Having secured his right to vote and purchase land, Parson married, started a family, and established himself as an independent community leader in Southampton County, achieving a hard-won personal liberation despite the systemic failures of the Reconstruction era.
As revealed by Parson’s genealogy, Reconstruction has ongoing effects, especially in the importance of addressing root causes and the need for ongoing human and civil rights enhancements. Racism is an inescapable reality in the American society. Still, the complexities of social problems, with their cultural subtleties and interconnectedness, demand a deeper understanding and more nuanced approaches than those used in managing a political solution.

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About Featured Book: Mijo, We Bend, Not Break by Francisco Castillo

Some inherit wealth. Others inherit silence. Three generations of men must decide which legacy to pass on.

From the sun-scorched fields of Michoacán to the crowded kitchens of California, Mijo, We Bend, Not Break traces the Martínez family’s struggle to survive, love, and redefine what strength really means. Joaquín grows up under a father whose distance teaches him that tenderness is weakness. Alejandro, his son, becomes a father himself-determined to be different, yet haunted by the weight of inherited silence. And Gabriel, the grandson, comes of age in a world where unspoken pain destroys families, daring to imagine a new way forward.

Spanning border crossings, economic upheaval, earthquakes, and a global pandemic, this sweeping novel captures both the private and public moments that shape generations. With searing honesty and lyrical grace, Francisco Castillo tells a story that is at once intimate and universal: the cost of silence, the power of vulnerability, and the courage it takes for men to finally say what they were never taught to speak.

Unforgettable, heart-wrenching, and ultimately hopeful, Mijo, We Bend, Not Break is a testament to resilience and the healing that becomes possible when families choose connection over silence.

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The Wretched and Undone by J. E. Weiner

A sinister specter is hell-bent on revenge, and an ethereal woman in white is desperate to repel the menacing force. A battle rages for the hearts, minds, and souls of the Anderwalds and their extended family of immigrant outcasts, Arab camel wranglers, wounded warriors, and a songstress on the verge of madness. A sweeping Southern Gothic saga unfolds in the Texas Hill Country, where history’s silenced voices rise amidst an astonishing tale that defies expectations.

On the eve of the Civil War, Polish immigrants Marcin and Agnieszka Anderwald arrive in Bandera, Texas, seeking a new beginning. But when Marcin crosses paths with a vengeful ghost known as the Shadow, their dream quickly turns into a nightmare. The Anderwalds’ baby drowns, and Agnieszka is convinced she is to blame. She starves herself to death, returning from the grave as a ghostly Woman in White, determined to protect her family. Marcin and Agnieszka’s son, Zacharias, burdened by grief, becomes entangled in a quest for vengeance that threatens his very soul. As he and his wife Liza clash with the relentless Shadow, they cling to hope when blessed with a child, John Marcin Anderwald.

But the curse of the Anderwalds is unyielding. John Marcin grows up amidst murder trials, haunting executions, and the ever-present Shadow that seeks to destroy his family. His love for the troubled singer Anna Schulte leads to further heartache, and his sons, Luke and Junior, inherit a legacy of sorrow and secrets that could tear them apart.

As the Anderwald legacy unfolds, each generation faces its own harrowing ordeal, where love and sacrifice are pitted against an unrelenting evil. Will they break free from the Shadow’s curse, or will they remain forever wretched and undone?

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Blood Sweat and Dreams by Robert Barzelay

“Blood, Sweat and Dreams” is a collection of ten gripping tales that plunge into the heart of human courage, sacrifice, and survival, each a portal to a distinct corner of the human experience, where mystery, and the unyielding pulse of life converge. These stories, diverse in setting and spirit, weave together the raw threads of adventure, and introspection, inviting you to journeys across continents, cultures, and the boundaries of the known world.

Imagine the sun-scorched streets in “Kidnapped in Tel Aviv” that sets the stage for a heart-pounding abduction, torment and mysterious developments, which end in bewilderment and the unexpected.

Or picture the vast, unforgiving expanse of the Sahara in “Emergency Landing in the Sahara”, where survival hinges on wit and will against the desert’s relentless embrace, the only nonfiction story, experienced by the writer himself.

In “The Signal in the Static”, the air crackles with enigma, as whispers from the ether hint at truths beyond our grasp, set against the ancient, sacred skyline of Jerusalem.

Venture further, to the jungles of Paraguay in “Eulogy with a Vengeance”, where justice takes on a primal edge, sharp and unyielding.

In “Silent Strike”, the stakes are global, the action swift, as operatives navigate a deadly dance of strategy and sacrifice to eliminate terrorists in North Africa.

Meanwhile, “Two 75-year-olds and a 75-year-old Skytrain” plunge you into the heart of human compassion, where heroes defy chaos to shield the vulnerable, saving lives in Darfur, their every step a gamble against fate.

Not all these tales pulse with adrenaline. “Esther’s Path of Acceptance” elaborates on the mindset of her father-in-law, Baruch Spinoza, an invitation to pause and be intrigued by this 17th-century philosopher, whose ideas of existence and freedom sparked revolutions of thought.

In contrast, “A Detour to Destiny” thrusts you back into the crucible of conflict, where chance encounters in Kashmir ignite life-or-death struggles, a land of rugged beauty, albeit a hotbed of revolt and dissension.

The collection also celebrates the vibrant tapestry of humanity. “A Journey through Time and Terrain” transports you to Aotearoa, where ancient Māori traditions breathe through sacred chants and the heartbeat of the haka, grounding the soul in community and earth.

Yet not all stories offer solace. “The Shadow of Sobibor”, a part fictional and true narrative of one of the writer’s family members, confronts the darkest chapters of history, unflinching in its portrayal of human cruelty and resilience, a stark reminder of the cost of antisemitism.

Brace yourself for these ten unforgettable stories that blur the line between the possible and the unimaginable. These ten stories, though distinct, are bound by a shared thread: they explore what it means to be human in the face of the extraordinary. From the pulse of danger to the whisper of wisdom, they challenge, inspire, and haunt. As you turn these pages, may you find yourself lost in worlds both familiar and strange, and may they leave you, as they have me as the writer, forever changed.

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