These 3 New Books by Colorado Authors Will Haunt Your Summer Reading List

Beach reads, poolside paperbacks, late-night page-turners: Summer books are typically our tickets out of reality. But these three forthcoming novels from Colorado authors do the opposite. Drawing on everything from reproductive rights and wartime trauma to online radicalization, they reflect our anxieties and experiences back at us—proof that fiction can still be escapist without looking away from the real world.

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Jump Ahead:

• Shadows in Dream Stone by Kelly K. Branyik
• When They Came Home by Terri Lewis
• A Voice in the Dark by Barbara Nickless

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Shadows in Dream Stone by Kelly K. Branyik

• Release Date: May 5, 2026
• Fiction: Branyik imagines the United States 400 years from now as a dystopian society functioning under the guise of freedom. The novel follows a teacher named Abaddon Ordell who is sent to the brutal Dream Stone prison nine years after committing the crime of suffering a miscarriage.
• Fact: The Southern Colorado author conceived the story after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. “I felt so much rage, and when I have big, strong emotions, I typically channel them into writing,” Branyik says. She admits that the book may be painful for readers, but it’s meant to be difficult. “The point of the story is that it is hard to watch, and it is hard to go through,” Branyik says. “But a lot of stuff that happens in the story is stuff that happens in real life to women.”

When They Came Home by Terri Lewis

• Release Date: May 5, 2026
• Fiction: Edith, a woman with few romantic options, finally finds love in Milton, a soldier returning from World War I. The couple marry, have two daughters, and begin an ideal life together on the family farm in Kansas—until their relationship starts to strain because of Milton’s unresolved trauma from the war.
• Fact: Inspired by documents and diaries she discovered stashed in an old candy box, the Denver writer draws from her own family history to explore shell shock—now recognized as PTSD—and the silent battles some veterans, including her grandfather, endured long after the fighting ended. “Many portraits of the war focus on what the guy went through,” Lewis says. “But I very seldom have read anything about what happened to the women when their husbands came home.”

A Voice in the Dark by Barbara Nickless

• Release Date: July 1, 2026
• Fiction: This psychological thriller begins with the murder of a husband, wife, and son and the disappearance of the family’s teenage twins. As FBI profilers trace parallels to a past case, they uncover a sinister online figure manipulating vulnerable followers into violence.
• Fact: A Voice in the Dark taps into growing concerns about digital influence, online radicalization, and how virtual spaces can become dangerously real. “The idea that nobody has to physically walk into our houses to put us at risk, the fact that they can enter through any screen,” says Nickless, who lives in Colorado Springs. “There’s this omnipresent sense that we aren’t safe anywhere anymore. We have already opened the door and invited the villain in.”

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