In Arhat, Iowa, there are cornfields and there's the Colony. Smart and precocious fifteen-year-old Eve is feeling stymied by both. So she gets her first job as a highway work crew flagman, falls in love with a local teen Adonis and his widowed father, and plots to intervene in her best friend's arranged marriage. As Thomas Rayfiel's Colony Girl races to an unexpected climax, Eve finds herself trying to save the colony at the same time as she struggles to break free of its ominous ...

She’s still not quite sure how it happened. The biological part is fairly straightforward. It’s the wife-and-mother part that Eve can’t wrap her head around. Much to her surprise, Eve finds herself living in Brooklyn, married to a doctor named Harvey, and toting a young infant named Ann. How did she get here? And where is that maternal instinct that was supposed to have kicked in by now?From winter afternoons spent freezing at the Tot Spot to playgroups where she inadvertently tell...

“They say the city never sleeps. It does. Just before dawn you can hear it snore. Light hangs in the air, directionless, not yet pressed into rays. The smell of a hidden sea soaks through stone. The streets themselves have that booming emptiness of a shell held to the ear. Everyone is dreaming. It’s when I began to wander, that time in between.”For Eve, newly arrived from a religious colony in the heartland, the sidewalks of New York aren’t conveyors of humanity, t...

“I am unacquainted with evil, there being no mirrors here,” begins the testimony of Ethan Harms, hero of Harms’ Way, Thomas Rayfiel’s dark depiction of prisoners and prison life. Harms’ Way takes us into the chilling world of a super-max detention facility where America’s most psychotic killers are kept in solitary confinement. Yet as we get to know Ethan and explore this world through his wry humor and tragic sense of destiny, we find ourselves uncomfortably at home. We ...