Georgia Lovett’s They Called Him LongMan is an ambitious family saga that blends missionary memoir, romance, medical drama, and multigenerational mystery into an emotionally charged narrative spanning four decades. Set primarily between rural Wisconsin and Papua New Guinea, the novel explores the lasting consequences of love, faith, secrecy, and redemption across multiple generations.
It’s 1997, and Poppy Turner was certain she was on the right track to meeting her future goals with her recent college degree in hand and a new job through her boyfriend, Spencer’s father. Spencer has money and is set on transforming Poppy to meet his family’s standards. But Poppy didn’t see what everyone else around her saw. After a horrific incident allows Poppy to see the truth, she is on the road immediately to her Aunt Barbara’s house in the small town of Cedar Springs, Mississippi. Soon she finds solace in two childhood friends, Joe and Luke. And what began as an escape turns into therapy as she discovers the letters exchanged by her grandparents, a new purpose serving the town, and the awakened feelings of a childhood crush. But the closer she gets to healing, the deeper the dreadful feeling that Spencer isn’t the type to just let her leave.
Diana Hayes’s Looking for Cornelius follows Deirdre, a Montreal music teacher who travels to Ireland with Éamon, her gifted thirteen-year-old fiddle student, as he competes for a scholarship at Cork College University. For Éamon, the journey represents an extraordinary opportunity to turn his musical talent into a future. For Deirdre, however, Ireland offers something more personal. Orphaned at twelve when a fire destroyed her family home, she has spent years searching for information about her great-grandfather, Cornelius Ó hAodha, a Traveller from West Cork who survived the Great Hunger and eventually disappeared into the uncertainties of family history. What begins as a musical journey gradually becomes a search for ancestry, belonging, and the ways the past continues to live within us.
