Catherine Wheels

Thomas’s carefully built life has been shattered. Everywhere he turns, he finds tragedy. After being left at the altar, he retreats to a remote castle in the mountains of Northwest Montana to live with an old college friend dying of lupus. But their painfully peaceful seclusion is ripped apart by the news that Thomas’s brother, an Episcopal priest, has killed himself, and his sister-in-law is abandoning her seven-year-old daughter, Catherine, into Thomas’s care.

After her unexpected arrival into this grim corner of the world, Catherine slowly breaches the isolation and penetrates the self-absorption. Like the prayer wheel on the wall of a nearby convent, Catherine gently but surely pulls the various dying people around her into the robust company of the loving and living.

Catherine Wheels is a lyrical novel of hope and redemption, the honest story of men and women who have had all the zest for life knocked out of them–damaged souls who are slowly brought back to health by a little girl who knows something the rest of them either never knew or had forgotten: something about prayer, love, and sacrifice.

Missing

Walking home from work one day with flowers for his wife, Leif Peterson discovers a Missing Person poster with his name and face on it. How can this be? A strange mistake? A cruel joke? It should be easy enough to ignore, but for some reason he can't. And then an anonymous text message on his phone sets into motion a chain of events that he could never have imagined. Oddly compelled to act impulsively, Leif soon finds himself in another city, in another country, in another hemisphere, with very little memory of his past, searching for a woman he knows by name, but whom he's never met. Originally written in eighty-four installments on Facebook, this book will take you down a road with so many twists and turns you'll never see the end coming.

Normal Like Us, Stories

If the big question is What is normal? then the big answer has to be Certainly not us! But Peterson isn't concerned with norms. What he wants us to know is that the world is full of wonder and mystery and surprises. We just have to be paying attention. From ice fishing on a couch, to dogs that are angels, to modern-day fertility rites, these stories will thrust you into the deep messiness of life and yet somehow you'll come away feeling hopeful.

Silo

After her aspiring hockey star and big brother Jamie dies, Samantha Riley's family goes into a tailspin. Her father becomes a workaholic and her mother goes into an almost comatose sleep. Fourteen-year-old Samantha is left trying to hold the family and the farm together, something she's not sure she's cut out for. Then one night, after an argument with her father, Samantha and her dog Reliable get lost in a violent storm. Eventually they find shelter in an abandoned silo where she finds the surprise of her lifetime. There's a boy living in the silo! And, he looks an awful lot like her dead brother, Jamie! But Corbin's goal has nothing to do with hockey. His goal is to get Samantha to reduce carbon emissions on their Ohio farm by 40,000 pounds a year. Holy moley! Samantha Riley is on a quest! Samantha begins greening up the farm, but in her efforts to heal the planet, she inadvertently finds she's found healing for herself and her family, and maybe the whole community.