There’s a vulnerability to the book that speaks to our inclination toward disaster, and that’s what elevates it beyond another cut-and-paste mystery novel.

November Storm, the debut story collection by Robert Oldshue, provides readers with nine intimate explorations of often haunted characters—a psychiatrist reliving a conversation that may have triggered a long-ago patient to kill his wife, a girl exploring her great-uncle’s prisoner-of-war history for her bat mitzvah project, a young kid accounting for the disappearance of his neighbor’s cat.

Healthcare figures prominently in many of the stories: there’s a children’s hospital, a kidney chain, a fetal surgeon, and a boy with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, among others from the world of illness and treatment.

Monks’s Appalachia is a place of miners laboring in impossibly dangerous conditions, poor women with drunken husbands, greed, exploitation, and desperate love.

Ventriloquizing historical figures is always tricky, but Lock does it with just the right mix of reverence, humanity, and skepticism.

Readers should be aware that, while Emmons’s work has a beautiful complexity, it is also challenging.

The characters in this collection are steeling themselves against familial change, a familiar conceit in contemporary short fiction which Comba handles with the grace and empathy of a veteran writer.

If you seek a guide—on coming of age, lost love, temptations both resisted and surrendered to, and the need to both engage with and respect the planet—Weed’s book is a good choice.

We are both flesh and spirit, alone and together, and our lives are a constant struggle to balance these conflicting states. Crawford’s deeply moving novel details our struggles to find that balance.