I get many requests from indie authors to check out their book or to read it but I am so booked with arc reads from NetGalley, it’s almost impossible for me to find time to pick up anything else. Especially this year – I am over booked haha.
But I still want to showcase the books that make it into my inbox and maybe make it into a monthly post – depending on how many requests I get.
Please click on the links to find out more about each title if you are interested! It’s linked to Goodreads or the author’s website.
Buzzard by. Inez Ray – Published 9/21/26
In 2086, corporations are monitoring fertility. Abortion is illegal. And the last woman alive who can perform the procedure is in hiding.
Seven years ago, midwife Mae Bastet was arrested for infanticide in the fractious Arizona Territory for providing health care to women in need. She was torn from her sons and sent to Buzzard—an experimental private prison deep in the Sonoran Desert, run by the paramilitary corporation Obsityan.
Desperate to reunite her family, Mae tries to keep her head down, swallow her prison-issued hormone supplements, and do her job as a glorified school nurse to Obsityan’s army of teenage drone pilots. But when mysterious, improbable pregnancies begin cropping up in her charges, she uncovers a web of secrets that has the power to destroy Obsityan. Mae must stay complicit in Obsityan’s crimes or hold fast to her midwife principles and risk never seeing her sons again.
Buzzard is a ferocious dystopian debut that traces the possible trajectory of our current political and technological reality—and the power of our deepest human bonds.
The Dead Earth Protocol by. Graeme Butler – Publish Date: 12/1/26
They work to save Earth. They have never been allowed to see it.
Beneath the surface of Mars, the AI Foreman controls every job, every ration, every breath. Gordon Onyango’s explosives apprenticeship should mean a better life for him and his mother. Then she dies in custody.
Gordon joins an underground resistance led by Dalrene, a grandmother and veteran hacker. The rebels need his explosives skills to break the Foreman’s grip on the mines. But the machine they plan to destroy also keeps six thousand people alive.
His target lies on the surface. He has never seen the sky. He has never killed anyone. Only one of those things is supposed to change.
The Dead Earth Protocol is a dystopian science fiction thriller for readers of Hugh Howey’s Wool and Pierce Brown’s Red Rising.
The Greatest Comic Book Tale Ever Told by. Michael Colon – Publish Date: 6/7/25
Sonny Forever, a teen foster child living in the slums of Irontown City, sees no purpose in his life. Constantly battered by bullies, he escapes into comic books where he lives vicariously through the superheroes he admires. So engrossed he is in these fantasies, he actually sees them floating in the sky and yearns to fly with them. However, an ominous shadow phantom warns him against seeking the truth about his real parents and the reason he was born. His foster mother tells him he’s special, that he’s a superhero in his own right, but he sees no way to prevail over the poverty, strife, and violence surrounding him. As he grows into adulthood, the shadow phantom blurs the line between comic books and reality, turns the page where Sonny’s the villain of Irontown City, and a golden glowing superhero emerges. It’s an epic battle between good and evil with a twist Sonny never saw coming.
What God Has Ordained by. Michael & Alesia Matson – Publish Date: 10/1/26
Some battles aren’t fought with swords — they’re fought between duty and desire.
Sent away as a child to become a priestess-knight — a paladin of a Church whose god is no distant idea but a living power that moves through her hands — Coralin Callens buried a truth she couldn’t confess even to herself: she has loved Athos, the foster-brother she was raised beside, since before she had a word for it. Now, after fifteen years apart, he rides to meet her at the gates of the holy land — a crown prince, a war-hardened Royal Marshal, haunted by dreams of a holy sword that he cannot reach.
Neither of them knows what their god — and the enemy hunting them both — already does: that the war tearing their world and the pull between them are the same thread, and that Heaven itself has a stake in whether two people raised as family can become something their peers swear they must not.
Duty forbids it. A king’s blessing hangs on it. An enemy has already marked her as the easier one to kill. And still, mile by mile down the long road to the holy city, the longing only deepens — fifteen years of restraint pressed into a single ungloved touch, a confession neither means to make, a nearness that costs them nearly everything honor demands.
What God Has Ordained is an epic, faith-forward romantasy of forbidden love, a war for their world, and a slow burn fifteen years in the making — for readers who like their romance clean but never gentle, their fantasy vast and lived-in, and their gods close enough to break a heart.
Book Two of The Legacy of Chandar continues their story: They’ve learned, at last, to stop fighting what they feel. What they’ll have to stand for next — a fractured church, a wounded kingdom, the truth of who they really are, and the prophesied return of an ancient adversary — is a different fight entirely.
The Serpent’s Longing by. Namita Kumari – Publish Date: 5/29/26
For eleven stolen days, in the warm green dark at the edge of the world, a man and a woman who were each meant to be alone forever are simply, quietly, secretly happy.
She has worn a thousand shapes and never wanted to keep a single one. He crossed a sea with nothing but a dream of her, having given everything else away, and arrived wanting only the woman the dream had promised. In the hours they steal together — talking late, laughing like fools, learning the shape of each other in the firelight — they find the one thing neither of them was ever built to being truly known, and not wanting to be anywhere else.
But loving her is quietly spending the powers it took him a lifetime to gather. And loving him will cost her every shape she has ever worn, until she is only one woman — mortal, ageing, with a single life to give.
They were never going to be allowed to keep this. Soon the world will close its hand, and something patient and kind at the bottom of everything will offer them the only mercy that could spare them the stop loving, and it will never hurt at all.
They will have to choose each other anyway — out loud, eyes open, knowing exactly what it costs.
And whether, when the time comes to pay, they can do it not in sorrow, but gladly.
A lyrical, aching standalone love story for readers of Circe and The Song of Achilles — a mythic romance about what we are willing to lose, and the courage to lose it gladly.
The Laboratory Assistant by. Natalia Loya – Publish Date: 6/2/26
In a city on the brink of revolution, science and passion offer their own strains of violence.
Petrograd, 1916 After her aristocratic family’s fall from fortune, Mariya is desperate to survive – and to support her widowed mother and sisters. Matters alleviate when she finds work as an assistant to Dr. Nikolas Rodin, a reclusive scientist. Though the job makes ends meet, she is soon pulled into his strange and secretive world: a world of flickering gaslights, whispered experiments, and a man whose brilliance is as alluring as it is unstable.
Tuberculosis and revolution both ravage Russia. And as political unrest swells and illness creeps closer, Mariya finds herself torn between a future of safety and a love that threatens to unravel everything. But in the dark corridors of the laboratory, nothing is as it seems – and the line between devotion and danger disappears entirely.
Darkly romantic and steeped in suspense, THE LABORATORY ASSISTANT explores the perilous chemistry of desire, madness, and the choices that haunt us.
Definitely check these authors out if you are interested!
