Books

Vanished Voices (2025)

When actor Elle Tuckerman loses her voice and her role off-Broadway, she flees to Tucson to help her ailing, enigmatic mother. Adjusting to her new reality, as well as the unfamiliar Southwestern landscape, she works with asylum seekers, their pasts treacherous, their futures uncertain. Elle grows curious about her own families’ stories. Do past voices reverberate in the air? Can they help her find her way forward? Across the centuries, in Maine, Ohio, and Tucson, families’ lives intertwine in scenes of relocation, transportation, and change.

Clifford’s Ghost: An Art Mystery (2019)

Finalist, New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, 2020

Chance brings together an unlikely pair: Xavier Escudero, a young, gay Puerto Rican from Spanish Harlem, and Emeline Hughes, an older widow from Manhattan’s Upper East Side. They’re drawn into the death of a Seventh-Avenue fashion designer, then the theft of a 9th-century Chinese statue. Faced next with questions about a 17th-century painting, “The Duke of Abrantes,” a more troubling question confronts them: Was the death of Emeline’s husband an accident? To find the answers, they must travel to London and Barcelona.

Preservation (2014)

Lee Baldwin moves to Maine to revel in a tide of solitude and brood about her missing husband. Instead, Limmington Mills draws her into the daily dramas of her landlady Dolly, and Dolly’s brother, a welder at Bath Iron Works; the store proprietor; an elderly woman with cancer; a trio of boys, running wild, and their mother may or may not have heard a saint speak. Evoking the lives of people struggling in the shadow side of prosperity, Lang explores the isolation, and possibilities, of a time before electronics linked us nonstop through the cloud.

Sarah Carlisle’s River and Other Stories (2012)

Nine stories cover 200 years, two continents, and the Caribbean. In one story an unwelcome train ride connects two college students, each unmoored from their religions. In another, a celebrated computer geek flies to the Caribbean to visit his father, about to make a change late in life, only to find his own future reprogrammed. The harmony of three musicians is altered for good after the trio accepts a booking at an Edinburgh nightclub. In Florida, a salvor, diving into the deep to make sense of the past, seeks to understand an unexpected treasure.

“It’s the vocal textures, nimble sentences. . . Lang writes of aspirations, chagrin, fleeting contentment, commingling ethnicities and temperaments so deftly we may forget we’re being edified.” –Virginia Ewer Wolff, winner of the 2002 National Book Award, Young People’s Literature for True Believer (Simon & Schuster/Atheneum)