Where cotton and conscience collide, one good man bets his soul on the people the world tries to forget.

In 1951 West Texas, aging cotton grower William Allen Littlejohn watches as  mechanization ends a way of life — and the lagunero migrant families who pick for him arrive for what both sides know will be their last season. Can one man’s quiet defiance of racism and exploitation can redeem a legacy rooted in slavery and empire?

Winner of the 2025 Sarton Award in historical fiction

A Family of Good Women by Teddy Jones is a historical mystery set in Borger, Texas, during the oil boom. When Imogene Good, still grieving her mother’s death, leaves behind a promising teaching career to open a boarding house in a rough, near-lawless town, she faces danger, loneliness, and a question that cuts to the heart of the story: what does family really mean?

Austin Sunrise closes Phil Oakley’s Oakleys trilogy. Brothers Brooks and Ray Oakley take opposite roads out of the family — one through the frozen ground of the war, the other through Austin cafes, the oil fields, and the postwar restaurant boom. It follows Little Hatchet and Runners.

The Best General in the Civil War is Conrad Bibens’s autobiographical novel in the voice of George Thomas — the Virginia-born Union general his family disowned and the South despised. Thomas earned the names Rock of Chickamauga and Sledge of Nashville, and was never fully trusted by Lincoln or Grant because of where he was born.

Espionage, Survival, and the Fight for Texas Independence

From the author of the French Letters trilogy comes a sweeping historical adventure full of unforgettable Texas legends. Laced with exuberant, historical figures such as Sam Houston, Mirabeau Lamar, and Jack Hays, Dangerous Latitudes is a quest across a war-torn frontier that becomes a race to save two hundred captured Texans who the Mexican army has marked for death.

A young woman on the run. A life built in the shadows. A story that refuses to be forgotten. At fifteen, Frankie ran from an abusive home with nothing but her wits and a gambler’s promise of escape. What she found was a world of speakeasies, bootlegging, and survival on the edge of the law. Now, decades later, her story is ready to be told—one of grit, defiance, and a woman who refused to be broken. Far From Uncertain is a historical novel by Teddy Jones.

In this historical novel by Paul Remmers, set in Galveston during the Great Storm of 1900, Dr. Douglas Schuler is fresh from medical school and interning in the thriving coastal city of Galveston, Texas. It’s a year of great progress in medicine, but his skills will be tested as the Great Storm approaches. Can he survive, win the girl of his dreams, and become the doctor he hopes to be?

Book One in The Oakleys Series 

Little Hatchet is the first installment in Phil Oakley’s Oakleys series, a family saga loosely based on his own kin. After the Civil War, James Oakley moves his family to Little Hatchet Creek in New Mexico. When his youngest son is taken from the front porch, twelve-year-old Walter Oakley goes after him — and the story runs from there into Prohibition-era Texas.

Runners is Book Two of Phil Oakley’s Oakleys series. Walter and Ada Oakley have made themselves model citizens of Telegraph, Texas, and are watching their children come apart — rum running, train-hopping, one child dead and another on the wrong side of the law — as Prohibition gives way to the Depression and then the war.

The Bugbear Hunter follows David Crockett through his years in Congress, between the frontier reputation that got him elected and the Washington he had to survive. Around him are Dr. William A. Caruthers, Ivy Green, and R.C. Crabtree, and behind them the Jackson presidency, the National Bank fight, and the widening gap between wealthy elites and struggling pioneers.

Llano Estacado is a historical Western novel by Max L. Knight set in 1870s Texas. A Comanche war leader and a Texas homesteader each lose their families to a massacre — and each spends a year hunting the other’s people. A story of the frontier cycle of vengeance, in the tradition of The Searchers.

Ghostly Bugles: A Novel of the Alamo by Max L. Knight — the first docent ever appointed at the Alamo — tells the 1836 siege from Texian, Tejano, and Mexican perspectives at once, through a dying man in present-day San Antonio to whom the battle’s dead, named and nameless, have begun to speak.

A tribute to bar bands, musical dreamers, and offbeat ambition….

The Rise of the Mad March follows four mismatched musicians — Christine on lead, Henry on rhythm, Gretchen on bass, Melissa on drums — through the year they became a band and the month they toured. It’s a tribute to the greatest band that never was — a novel about the bands that never headlined, never got signed, and never had an answer when someone asked why they weren’t famous.

Under the Gulf Coast Sun is a coming-of-age novel by Skip Rhudy set against the sun-soaked beaches of Port Aransas, Texas, in 1978. Kassie Hernandez is aiming for a career in the space program and is not looking for anything else. Then she meets a surfer named Connor O’Reilly at one of the island’s Pod House parties, and the summer stops going the way she planned. A coming-of-age tale set against the sun-soaked beaches of 1970s Port Aransas, Rhudy weaves a love letter to the people and culture of the Texas coast.

2026 Spur Award-Winning Finalist for Best Western Contemporary novel. 

Everyone knows who killed Maggie Schneider. But why? Inspired by true events, novelist Cynthia Leal Massey weaves an intricate tale that spans the decades from the Great Depression to the crippling drought of the fifties. The 1958 murder of champion turkey breeder Maggie Schneider in south central Texas is not a whodunnit. The mystery here is more profound: Why did he do it?