2025 SLR Holiday Gift Guide

Books make the best gifts! Here are some great choices for the readers on your list.

Donna’s Picks

Junah at the End of the World by Dan Leach offers a lively, endearing voice in a coming-of-age story about a boy who is a bit of a misfit. Set during the lead-up to Y2K when we all thought the world might end, this novel has it all: warm and wonderful characters, sparkling dialogue, and gems of wisdom scattered throughout the pages.

Horse People by Sarah Warner is heart-warming story centered on Frank Grace, an accountant traumatized by malfeasance he witnessed in Iraq. As Frank struggles to build a new life for himself, he buys a horse hoping that taking care of it will help him heal. It brings him in contact with an immigrant family and a veterinarian who give his life new meaning.

A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom, a devastating memoir by Brittany K. Barnett, a young lawyer who devotes her life to freeing people serving a life sentences without parole, often for nonviolent first-time drug offenses.

Resurrected Body by Elizabeth Cranford Garcia is an outstanding poetry collection about the challenges of family and motherhood. Perfect mothers? Not in Garcia’s book.

The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush by Susan Gilmore is a touching novel with a spiritual core. After Leonard insists on a proper burial service for his amputated leg, others in the community begin to approach him to bury the things that cause them guilt.

Fun City Heist by Michael Kardos is an entertaining crime caper. It offers page-turning tension, plenty of surprising plot twists, and one obstacle after another littering the path to a band hoping to come together for one last gig.

And finally, three exciting thrillers:

• Robert Bailey’s Boomerang is a medical thriller that asks the question if a company came up with a cure for cancer, would it be made available to everyone? If so, what would the consequences be?
• Lori B. Duff’s The Devil’s Hand features attorney Jessica Fischer. In this second book in the series, Jessica stands up for a housewife against an abusive and powerful man. But what should be a simple case quickly becomes far more complicated.
• Brandon Keller’s The Game: A High-Stakes Conspiracy of Power, Poker, and Profit, is a financial thriller centered around cutting-edge developments in artificial intelligence.

Claire’s picks

Novels:

Over Yonder by Sean Dietrich is far more than another action-adventure tale, though it is that too. Rather, Over Yonder is a character study in transcendence and redemption, written with Dietrich’s everyman eloquence and his profound, kindly insights into the human condition.

Bless Your Heart by Leigh Dunlap is a wickedly entertaining novel set in Atlanta’s rich Buckhead enclave that leads its readers on a merry chase to the finish. And what a finish: the book has one of the most satisfying resolutions of any murder-mystery novel readers are likely to find.

Medici Curse by Daco S. Auffenorde is a splendid gothic thriller with a dramatic whirl of the supernatural, which offers readers everything they might want from a thriller. It’s an atmospheric, mysterious, often intense, and always captivating novel.

Memoir:

The Athlete Whisperer: An Improbable Voice in Sports by Andrea Kirby is an intelligent and important memoir by someone with a brave story to share. Well written and engrossing, it tells how a woman from a small Southern town became a trailblazer as ABC’s first female sports broadcaster in the 1970s and then went on to create a whole new field—media coaching for athletes.

Poetry

Distant Relations by Cheryl Whitehead  is a fine, evocative collection of poetry, well worth the reading—and rereading. To visit the world and the kith and kin found in Distant Relations is to visit a rich place, filled with vivid, vibrant life and meaning.

The Tears of Things by Catherine Hamrick is an exquisite, sensory-rich and sensitive body of poems that vividly capture with what it means to love, lose, fall, get up, and do it all again. Hamrick’s language is consistently vibrant, and often unique and her talented use of meter makes some poems a joy to read out loud.

Like Zero, Like Pearls by Lola Haskins is a collection of stunning poems, rich with the power to awaken readers’ senses to the beauty and intricacy of nature—specifically, insects. Even if you don’t come to the book with a natural fascination for the subject, don’t worry—you’ll find yourself drawn in.

 Letters to Little Rock by Jennifer Horne is a superb book for quite a few reasons, not the least of which is her supple use of demanding and seemingly constraining poetic forms. Horne is a former Poet Laureate of Alabama.

Great and Small by Paul Dugat is a moving, engaging debut collection in which the poet exhibits skill, talent, and keen powers of observation in writing about Texas landscapes, Alabama life, and other topics as he travels lyrically between the backyard and the cosmos.

Mystery Series

The three books in Stacey Horan’s “Old City Mysteries,” including A Place for Good and Evil, City of Innocent Monsters, and There Will Be Pirates spin beguiling, mysterious tales that are just flat-out fun to read, chilling and charming both, set in St. Augustine, Florida.

Dawn’s Picks

Short Story Collections:

The Computer Room by Emma Easley proves that there are still a few out there with a sense of humor. Easley takes her readers on a time travel machine to the era of the Backstreet Boys, Myspace, when reality stars were just becoming a thing, and the interment was still dial-up. This collection of short fiction is a must for Millennials and Gen-Z readers, yet any generation should get it. Though the stories, witty and light-hearted, depict a more innocent time, hanging over the reader is the knowledge that there is a “before” and “after.” The collection is an excellent commentary on a generation. What was touted as the communication era is actually the advent of a communication breakdown.

Hellions by Julia Elliott: In Hellions Julia Elliott disturbs and bewitches her readers. This collection defies conventional story telling blending Greek and Roman mythology, mysticism, fairy tales and folklore, as well as allusions to the Old Testament and nursey rhymes. Her female characters are formidable. They reject the maiden, mother, and crone archetypes to introduce a new feminist narrative. And on top of that, Elliott’s prose is transcendent.

Deep Water Dark Horizons by Suzanne Hudson: From the 2025 Alabama Truman Capote Award for Short Fiction, Suzanne Hudson’s collection of short stories, essays, and novel excerpts are raw, ironic, hyperbolic, unapologetic, and also hysterically funny. Hudson’s characters, settings, and plots are in every way a self-portrait of the South, a topic, for better or worse, that Hudson knows in spades.

Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds by Christian Moody: Winner of the 2023 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Moody’s wonder tales are a cornucopia of genres from weird fiction to eco-horror, from experimental fiction to sci-fi. There’s something darker that lurks beneath the surface of Moody’s seemingly playful stories.

Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars by Daniel Wallace: From the award-winning author of Big Fish comes a collection that captures fundamental moments—that time when everything shifts and life as you know it changes in a flash. Wallace’s characters are runaways, divorcees, honeymooners, husbands and wives, and even a missing person. They salvage what they can from the fallout. Though the stories are outwardly bleak, because Wallace’s characters are so resilient and persevere, there is a glimmer of hope.

Novel:

The Dissonance by Shaun Hamil: Named BookPage’s 10 Best Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror novels for 2025, Hamil’s dynamic setting in the multiverse is not only genre-blending but also world-blending. The Dissonance is an outsider story where the characters must work together to combat an entity even more evil than their inner demons.

The Story She Left Behind by Patti Calahan Henry: From the New York Time’s Bestselling author comes a gripping historical fiction novel of lost love and fractured mother/daughter relationships. Calahan’s novel is a magical and mysterious literary adventure.

Novella:

The Flayer by D.C. Phillips: Is the Flayer a real serial killer reducing the population of the small town of Felton or is he or she simply another boogeyman drawn from local legends and folklore? Winner of the Best Indie Novella Award for horror, Phillips’ novella is an oxymoronic reading experience because along with the terrifying aspect of a serial killer on the loose Phillips’ main character is very tongue and cheek. This is an edge of your seat read that will ironically make you laugh.

Poetry: 

The Guide to North American Birds by Garrett Ashley: Pruned or chopped down to fit into landscaping designs, to “reside” in concrete jungles—My head is removed. My neck, my shoulders. The moreminde of myself, the less I remember—A Field Guide to North American Trees remind us that trees are not mere abstractions, but nature’s divinity. Garrettt Ashley’s poems are a surprising and unique approach to anthropomorphism and nothing short of brilliant.

Mary Ellen’s Picks

The Secret Life of Flora Lea by Patty Callahan Henry. Just when you think her books can’t possibly get any better, they do. This is a magical tale about two sisters and a secret world they created. When the younger sister disappears, her sister can’t ever keep from hoping to find her. Then, one day, a very special book finds its way into her hands.

Kate Landry Has a Plan by Rebekah Millet is an outrageously funny story set in New Orleans about forty year old Kate, a plucky woman who is trying to run her own business, raise her sister’s orphaned child, and overcome a lingering heartbreak when a handsome man from her past appears.

Beach House Rules by Kristy Woodson Harvey is quite an inventive story set on the beach in North Carolina. Four women and six children wind up, each through their own set of circumstances, living together in a mommune. In the mix there is a black widow, a gossip columnist, and teenagers. True to style, there are some delightful and delectable twists and turns that will have you alternating between Geez, I didn’t see that coming; and well, of course!

 Ship Watch by Johnathon Scott Barrett is an utterly delightful romp through the playgrounds of the Southern Aristocracy in Savannah, Sea Island, Highlands, and Buckhead. It all starts with a plantation, doesn’t it always? Grab your martini, put on your pearls, and prepare to have a good read.

Where the Rivers Merge is an epic novel and the first part of a duology by Mary Alice Monroe. Transported in time and place between the great city of Charleston and a Lowcountry plantation, we follow the journey of Eliza Rivers Chalmers DeLancey from the time she was eight years old in 1908, until her eighty-eighth birthday in 1988. Riveting and compelling, this story leaves us desperately wanting the sequel.

Payne-ful Business: Charleston’s Journey to the Truth by Margaret Seidler is an extraordinarily well documented and in-depth study of slavery in Charleston. The author, who believed that she was from working class people that had nothing to do with slavery, found herself to be a descendant of William Payne who had the largest slave trading business in Charleston. Margaret will take you on a journey of inclusion and healing.

 Till There Was You by Lindsay Hameroff is a very light read romcom that will entertain you endlessly without taking up any real estate in your brain. Lexi Berman, who is 24, and a culinary student who wants to become an executive chef in a Michelin star restaurant. As luck, and fate, would have it, romance gets in her way.

Waltons Creek- Land of Our Fathers, Volumes 1 and 2 by Rickie Zayne Ashby are sequential novels about two families that live in the hills of Kentucky. Based on members of his own family, Mr. Ashby portrays what rural life was like in Western Kentucky during the years of 1913 to 1971.