The Best Peace Fiction

Named Peacemaker of the Year in the 2022 Independent Publisher (IPPY) Book Awards In the first anthology of its kind, Robert Olen Butler and Phong Nguyen assemble an astounding collection of stories that cause readers to contemplate war, peace, and social justice in a new light. The fourteen stories featured in this volume explore the varied and often unexpected outcomes of violence. The authors explore the tragedies that occur closer to home--not on military battlefields but rather in places that are never meant to be battlefields, like schools and churches. The fiction reveals the violence that renders our most sacred and seemingly safest of places vulnerable. Not a utopian project, this book asks whether literature has a role in furthering the ongoing pursuit of peace and justice for all. While exploring tragedy, these stories also offer hope for healing, illuminating how people can move forward from the moments when their lives change and how they can regain and reshape safe spaces to find solace.

The heartbreaking portrait of a large, rural southern family's attempt to grapple with their mother's desperate decision to make her newborn son into the daughter she will never have When the seventh child of the Peace family, named Perfect, turns eight, her mother Emma Jean tells her bewildered daughter, "You was born a boy. I made you a girl. But that ain't what you was supposed to be. So, from now on, you gon' be a boy. It'll be a little strange at first, but you'll get used to it, and this'll be over after while." From this point forward, his life becomes a bizarre kaleidoscope of events. Meanwhile, the Peace family is forced to question everything they thought they knew about gender, sexuality, unconditional love, and fulfillment.

Davy kills two men and leaves home. His father packs up the family in a search for Davy.

The first installment of David Peace's electrifying Red Riding Quartet vividly brings to life a gritty, dangerous working class city tormented by a series of brutal murders. Nineteen Seventy-Four follows Eddie Dunford, the newly minted crime correspondent for the Yorkshire Post. His first story is about Clare Kemplay, a young girl recently found brutally murdered. While the police department and other crime reporters at the newspaper believe it's an isolated incident, Eddie finds a pattern between Clare's disappearance and those of other girls from a few years earlier. Despite his better judgment, and against the advice of others, he starts to dig deep. What he finds is a nightmare of corruption, violence, blackmail, and obsession that ultimately leads to a shocking, explosive conclusion.

When her beloved country, Chile, is taken over by a militaristic, sadistic government, Celeste is sent to America for her safety and her parents must go into hiding before they "disappear."

When an imperial family is found butchered, Officers of God are called to investigate. Evidence points to a rebel group trying to stab fear into the very heart of the empire. Inspector Khlid begins a harrowing hunt for those responsible, but when a larger conspiracy comes to light, she struggles to trust even the officers around her.

David Peace's acclaimed Red Riding Quartet continues with this exhilarating follow-up to Nineteen Seventy-Four. It's summer in Leeds and the city is anxiously awaiting the Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Detective Bob Fraser and Jack Whitehead, a reporter at the Post, however, have other things on their minds-mainly the fact that someone is murdering prostitutes. The killer is quickly dubbed the “Yorkshire Ripper” and each man, on their own, works tirelessly to catch him. But their investigations turn grisly as they each engage in affairs with the prostitutes they are supposedly protecting. As the summer progresses, the killings accelerate and it seems as if Fraser and Whitehead are the only men who suspect or care that there may be more than one killer at large.

“An almost perfect novel” of yearning, adventure, and redemption in the dying days of the Old West from the bestselling author of Peace Like a River (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). Minnesota, 1915. With success long behind him, writer, husband, and father Monte Becket has lost his sense of purpose . . . until he befriends outlaw Glendon Hale. Plagued by guilt over abandoning his wife two decades ago, Hale is heading back West in search of absolution. And he could use some company on the journey. As the modern age marches swiftly forward, Becket agrees to travel into Hale’s past, leaving behind his own family for an adventure that will test the depth of his loyalties and morals, and the strength of his resolve. As they flee the relentless former Pinkerton Detective who’s been hunting Hale for years, Becket falls ever further into the life of an outlaw—perhaps to the point of no return. With its smooth mix of romanticism and gritty reality, So Brave, Young, and Handsome examines one ordinary man’s determination to risk everything in order to understand what it’s all worth, in “an old-fashioned, swashbuckling, heroic Western . . . [An] adventure of the heart and mind (The Washington Post Book World).