Barry Award for Best First Novel

Devsingh Balan's three books ask one question at three sizes: the self, the workplace and the things we make. Read separately, they are a spiritual companion, a leadership handbook and a design essay. Read in order, they become a single argument about attention, and this analysis traces what that argument gives a reader who stays for all three.

A spoiler-free review of Reap & Sow by Charlotte B. Plumb: three siblings who pay off their dead father's demonic debt by selling strangers to the mirror in their cellar, ten years short of freedom with the harvest closing in.

An orphaned eighteen-year-old arrives at a decaying college outside Salem and learns that four wealthy heirs are the last of a cursed coven, and that she may be the female witch they have waited three centuries for. Atmospheric, sexy and cleverly built, with a mystery that barely moves.