This week’s feature is Jim Cohee’s novel The Swan. Cohee, a retired editor for Sierra Club Books, lives in San Francisco. This is his first book.
This novel is also one of the first titles to be released from Break Away Books, an imprint of Indiana University Press. Edited by Susan Neville and Michael Martone, this series will focus on “fiction, memoir, creative nonfiction, and poetry with a Midwest connection.” Like Switchgrass Books, the imprint of Northern Illinois University Press, which launched in the fall of 2009, the goal of this series is to feature work that is rooted in the Midwest but transcends regionalism. Break Away Books describes their titles, saying, “the books connect the reader to the region via childhood memories, the land itself, defining moments in one’s life that took place in the region, historical subjects or events.”
Here is a description of Cohee’s book:
Set in Indianapolis in 1957, The Swan, is a fictional memoir detailing a young boy’s journey through personal tragedy and what he learns along the way about enduring love and the weighty nature of mortality. Ten-year-old Aaron Cooper has witnessed the death of his younger sister, and the trauma has left him unwilling to speak. Aaron copes with life’s challenges by disappearing into his own imagination. The tales he constructs for himself, the real-life stories he is witness to, and his mother’s desperate efforts to bring her son back from the brink, all come to a head at an emotional family dinner.
We’re happy to help celebrate the launch of Break Away Books by selecting Jim Cohee’s debut novel as our featured title this week. If you’d like to learn more about the imprint or their forthcoming books, please visit their Website.
You can also win one of three signed copies of this book, which we’ll be giving away next week to three of our Twitter followers. To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).
To all of you who are already fans, thank you!
