Ruchika Tomar’s debut novel, A Prayer for Travelers, explores the complicated legacy of the American West and the trauma of female experience.  Juliet Grames’s novel The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna is a family saga about sisterhood, secrets, Italian immigration, the American dream, and one woman’s fight against her own fate. In The Gone Dead from Chanelle Benz, a young woman returns to her childhood home in the American South and uncovers secrets about her father’s life and death.