Bywater Books is pleased to announced that Goldenrod by Ann McMan and Close to Home by Rachel Spangler have been shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Romance.
For the quirky residents of Jericho, life has as many twists and turns as a winding mountain road.
GOLDENROD takes us on a delightful journey back to Jericho, a sleepy town in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia where life is anything but dull.
Maddie and Syd struggle to find a new normal without their foster child, Henry, who has been reunited with his disabled-veteran father. Henry befriends Buddy—an enigmatic young man who is fascinated with pi, and Dorothy—a young girl wrestling with her own brand of family demons. Meanwhile, David takes on the town’s nemesis as a write-in candidate for mayor—and the irrepressible Roma Jean Freemantle struggles to wrangle an unwieldy bookmobile and her growing attraction to another woman.
Journeys of life and love take some unexpected turns in this endearing community, but through it all, hope and the human spirit glow as brilliantly as goldenrod in the midsummer sun.
Close to Home by Rachel Spangler
When you’re convinced you’re broken, even the most loving messages can’t get through.
Kelly Rolen is a CPA—she’s smart, she’s focused, and she’s worked hard to build an orderly career and a respectable life in her hometown of Darlington, Illinois. Everything is precisely as it should be. Well, it is until her father suffers a debilitating stroke during the busiest time of her year—tax season. Suddenly, Kelly finds herself overworked, exhausted, behind schedule, and forced to hire an intern to meet her deadlines.
Elliot Garza is young and brash, but she’s also a talented accounting student who is charismatic, driven, and solely focused on completing her internship so she can escape from the bleak Midwestern town to Washington, DC and her dream job. She knows she has the professional skills necessary to do the job well, but she is less certain about her ability to handle her beautiful, prickly, demanding, and compelling new boss.
In this fresh new romance from one of the genre’s top young authors, will Kelly’s past and Elliot’s future add up to something greater than the sum of their escalating attraction, or will the answer to their equation end up hitting too close to home?
Now in their thirtieth year, the Lambda Literary Awards celebrate achievement in LGBTQ writing for books published in 2017. The finalists were chosen from nearly 1,000 submissions and over 300 publishers. Submissions came from major mainstream publishers and from independent presses, from both long-established and new LGBTQ publishers, as well as from emerging publish-on-demand technologies. 67 literary professionals, including booksellers, book reviewers, librarians, authors, academics and previous Lammy winners and finalists volunteered countless hours of reading, critical thinking, and invigorating discussion to select the finalists in 23 categories.
