Full AspenCat Catalog

Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances "Frankie" McGrath hears these unexpected words, it is a revelation. Raised on idyllic Coronado Island and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing, being a good girl. But in 1965 the world is changing, and she suddenly imagines a different choice for her life. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she impulsively joins the...

"In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything...

"Talulah Barclay doesn't like complications. Unfortunately, they seem to love her. Fourteen years after leaving her fiancé at the altar, Talulah returns to her hometown of Coyote Canyon, Montana, to settle her great-aunt's estate. As she'd feared, her "runaway bride" reputation is waiting right where she left it, and her ex's best friend, Brant, isn't about to let her slip by unnoticed. Brant has always been a loyal friend, but Talulah's decision...

"The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's once-lucrative car business is going under--but rather than face the music, he's spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to...

"The rules of summer book club are simple: No sad books; No pressure ; Yessssss, wine! Besties Laurel and Paris are excited to welcome Cassie to the group. This year, the book club is all about fill-your-heart reads, an escape from the chaos of the everyday—running a business, raising a family, juggling a hundred to-dos. Even the dog is demanding (but the bestest boy). Since Laurel’s divorce, she feels like the Worst Mom Ever. Her skepticism of...

A novel about the difference between going home and finding yourself there. What is the price of regret? Is love ever wrong? What does it mean to forgive? When the distant mother he hasn't seen in ten years desperately calls him home, struggling actor Wally Day finds his carefully constructed world falling in on itself. Now he must confront the reasons he left his hometown in a cloud of anger, shame, and guilt, he must look face-to-face upon the ghosts...

"Antonietta Amore - lovingly nicknamed Anna by her family - was once a girl who took baths full of rose petals while she imagined a future of romance and travel outside of her home in the sprawling hills of Sicily. But now, hardened by time and a move to America, a land still rough around the edges, she simply goes by Nan as she tries to make a life for herself and the young daughter she never meant to have. Building her home, Haven House, from the...

A novelist attempts to write a book about Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, a mother and artist whose harrowing pregnancies reveal the cost of human reproduction. Soon, however, the novelist’s own painful experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, as well as her increasing awareness of larger threats from climate change to pandemic, force her to give up on the book and turn instead to writing a contemporary Frankenstein, based on the story of...

"Thirty-three-year-old Abby Stern has made it to a happy place. True, she still has gig jobs instead of a career, and the apartment where she's lived since college still looks like she's just moved in. But she's got good friends, her bike, and her bicycling club. She's at peace with her plus-size body--at least, most of the time--and she's on track to marry Mark Medoff, her childhood summer sweetheart, a man she met at the weight-loss camp that her...