In a literary roundup that spans philosophical fiction, poetry, historical adventure, and memoir, (BookTrib) has spotlighted four new titles that collectively ask how much of life is chosen and how much is imposed. The selections—Daniel Mack’s “Over the Hills and Far Away,” Diane Skye Gropper’s “Dancing Through Seafoam,” W. Kenneth Tyler Jr.’s “Hunting the Red Fox,” and Don Schofield’s “From the Cyclops Cave”—arrive at a moment when readers are increasingly drawn to stories that confront questions of agency, memory, and moral consequence.
Mack’s novel centers on John Merlan, a therapist nearing retirement with an irregular heartbeat and a dwindling roster of clients. Newly settled in Central Florida, Merlan drives the back roads of the Lake Wales Ridge, researching local history and wondering what free will really means. His questions grow stranger as mysterious encounters blur imagination and reality. Meanwhile, half a world away, a clandestine experiment pursues an astonishing possibility: if the human soul is the source of free will, could that freedom be eliminated altogether? The book combines one man’s search for meaning with a larger mystery about choice and control. It is available at https://tinyurl.com/over-the-hills-daniel-mack.
Gropper’s poetry collection explores the fleeting nature of life through a personal and spiritual lens, drawing on decades of studying Buddhism, Native American teachings, and other traditions. The poems reflect on love, loss, past lives, healing, mortality, and connections that endure beyond a single lifetime. The title captures her central image: life as a dance through seafoam—beautiful and fragile, appearing briefly before disappearing. Yet the soul’s journey continues, shaped by love, memory, and choices. The collection is available at https://tinyurl.com/dancing-through-seafoam.
Tyler’s historical novel begins in 1942, when Perry Barnes faces a choice between Army conscription and prison for stealing jewelry. He opts for the military and lands in a special operations unit, learning espionage, sabotage, lock picking, and safe cracking—skills that could make him a first-class jewel thief. After the war, his adventures take him from 1950s Hollywood stunt work to professional golf alongside Ben Hogan and Arnold Palmer. He then meets gem investigator Sophia Toscana and becomes entangled in the theft of the Mecklenburg Diamond from a master thief known as the Red Fox. The book has earned a World’s Best Magazine Award, an Independent Press Award for humor, and a NYC Big Book Award. It is available at https://tinyurl.com/hunting-the-red-fox.
Schofield’s memoir looks back on a childhood marked by abandonment and instability. Raised by a succession of adults after his father left him with strangers, he carries those wounds into adulthood and eventually to Greece. From a primitive hut on the island of Kýthnos, known locally as the Cyclops Cave, he revisits the past, moving between his solitary life in the Cyclades and vivid scenes from 1950s California. Written with a poet’s attention to image and place, the memoir explores resilience, identity, family, and the complicated work of understanding the people who shaped us. It is available at https://tinyurl.com/from-the-cyclops-cave.
Together, these books reflect a broader cultural appetite for narratives that resist simple answers. Whether through a therapist’s metaphysical doubts, a poet’s meditation on impermanence, a thief’s quest for redemption, or a memoirist’s reckoning with abandonment, each title insists that the most important questions—about freedom, identity, and what we owe one another—remain urgently open.
