The Geology of Secrets
Don Corely devotes himself to daily walks through his family’s meadowland, seeking solace from the troubling questions of abandonment that surround his mother’s mysterious death when he was a kid: Was it suicide or an accident? So caught in the past, he is blind to the land’s well-being as a warming climate threatens, until a stranger, Sakura Gonzalez, who claims ancestral ties to the land, appears and unleashes family secrets, forcing him to confront a drying, fading meadow. As they toil there one summer, Corely tangles with matters of the heart, landownership, and ways to sustain the meadowland’s past as well as its future.
On Sale Jan 15, 2027
About Debra
A native of New Mexico, Debra Hughes’ writing touches on the region’s land and people, for which she received an International Regional Magazine Award. Image Journal recently published a novel excerpt from her novel-in-progress, and other short fiction has appeared in Tierra: Short Fiction of New Mexico, Walking the Twilight: Women Writers of the Southwest, New Letters, Blue Mesa, and New Mexico Humanities Review. Author ofAlbuquerque in Our Time (Museum of New Mexico Press), her nonfiction has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Huffington Post, The Writer’s Harbrace Handbook, New Mexico Magazine, El Palacio Magazine, USA Today, Dallas-Times Herald, and others. Hughes holds a Master of Arts degree in American Literature and Creative Writing from The Ohio State University and has served on the founding advisory board of Narrative Magazine. She is a member of the Authors Guild and New Mexico Writers.
“Debra Hughes writes with elegant restraint and compelling narrative tension, and her knowledge of the Western landscape adds stunning precision and urgency to her storyteller’s art.”
-Melissa Pritchard, author of Flight of the Wild Swan, A Solemn Pleasure and Palmerino
Books & Publications
