In Another Sun
Available 23 January 2026
Second edition. The American-born only child of Mexican immigrants, Vanessa Ochoa thought she knew what she wanted until she got it. But when a crisis forces her to redefine her life and start over in the place she swore she would never return to, she searches for something transcendent among the ruins of memory. The narrative weaves in and out of key moments of her youth and adult life: her decision to leave her hometown, her career ascension, and the pursuit of temporal and material desires. Exploring themes of time and fate, family and character, and perseverance against odds, Vanessa’s journey is an ode to grace and hope laid bare.
Fire In Hand Media
2026 (second edition; 2020 first edition)
220 pages
ISBN (print): 9798986092775
ISBN (ebook) 9798999476807
Praise
With a simultaneously urgent and unhurried voice, the novel pulses between the past and future and disappointment and possibility as Vanessa searches for a bridge between the known and the unknown while she aims for the steady surge of the Pacific. In chronicling her journey with grace and empathy, Auten also shows the American Dream, hatched in hope, can sour within a generation. A moving, heartbreaking, and thoroughly immersive story. I’ll miss Vanessa, her insistent voice and her lost chances haunting long after the last page.
—Jeff Ewing, author of The Middle Ground
In Another Sun reminds us life is experienced in fragments, shards of memories, snippets of conversations, and through what is and what could have been. Auten’s prose thoughtfully explores the powerful notion that, perhaps above all, our heart’s desire is simply to be known.
—Debbie Graber, author of Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday
Auten’s writing is lyrical, propulsive, and alive. In Another Sun is peopled with characters that will be familiar, but this is not a story you’ve read before.
—Alex Higley, author of Old Open
The ephemeral meets the inevitable in William Auten’s novel, In Another Sun. This story is a gift of words, strung together like beads on a twisting strand, leading us forward and backwards through Vanessa Ochoa’s life. Her reflective journey is an ode to time and grace, a story of lives intersecting and loves lost, of treasured connections and faith restored. Beautifully rendered and mesmerizing, In Another Sun is a book to treasure.
—Alice Kaltman, author of Staggerwing and Wavehouse
Night School
“What you hear is what you know, but what you don’t know is what you need to hear.” When college radio DJ Scotty Piper receives mysterious messages connected to his love of music and encyclopedic knowledge about a legendary rock band and their enigmatic guitarist, he leaves behind his colleagues and everything familiar and raises the odds he may never return home or to the job that keeps him grounded and gives him meaning. Scotty pursues answers and untangles riddles, diving into an oceanside city’s natural and supernatural history, an underground world of allies among enemies and enemies among allies, and groups and individuals haunted by transcendence. Like a detective, he unearths the truth about things that are seen but temporal and those that are unseen and eternal. Scotty’s journey among media and tech, money and corporations, the secular and sacred, and illusions and reality reveals an inescapable longing to be part of something larger.
Fire In Hand Media
2025
364 pages
ISBN (print): 9798986092713
ISBN (ebook): 9798986092720
Buy from the publisher (preferred)
Pepper’s Ghost
2025 ScreenCraft Cinematic Prose Quarterfinalist
2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist for Contemporary Fiction
BEHOLD THE GORILLA-GIRL! Charlotte Alexandra Long is determined to leave all she knows: her ill-fitting office job, her unreliable boyfriend, and the city she has lived in since adolescence. But leaving that life requires leaving her haunted father who wants nothing but the best for her yet reminds her of a past he’s not ready to let go. After joining a traveling amusement company as a sideshow performer, where an old theater trick blurs illusion and reality, Charlotte transforms into Alex who ascends into a star. While wrestling with a spectrum of coworkers, her evolving identity, her troubled father, and her concerned mother, Alex faces an uncertain future that threatens everything she has established. As Pepper’s Ghost weaves in and out of the South and Midwest, Alex must reevaluate who she is and navigate the crossroads of family, memories, and places that challenge her in times of ambiguity and tragedy.
Fire In Hand Media
2024 (second edition; 2016 first edition)
386 pages
ISBN (print): 9798986092737
ISBN (ebook): 9798986092744
Buy from the publisher (preferred)
Praise
An immediately absorbing read, Pepper’s Ghost is a deftly crafted and consistently compelling novel that reveals author William Auten as a genuinely gifted and impressively skilled storyteller.
—Midwest Book Review
Pepper’s Ghost will lure readers into its depth. The young character is unlike most leading female characters. William Auten portrayed the realities of life along with fantasy in way that made readers like myself more curious. Memories and emotions were strong: it was easy to be swept up within them. Pepper’s Ghost is entertaining, mysterious, and deep.
—Urban Book Reviews
October
2023 ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Competition Quarterfinalist
Faced with increasing loneliness and mortality, Patty Pemberton is torn between a past she honors, a present she assumes is stable, and a future she doesn’t know how to plan for. After a new friend disappears from her life, and as autumn deepens and the year’s end closes in, she journeys into her community and the places and histories binding them all—and haunting her—until she arrives at what is most important while hoping her friend returns. Rich with characters and locations, as well as personal and public chronicles, October is a moving and compassionate meditation on life, love, memory, and death.
“Every day, I move between Saul and Ray. And although Ray has been gone for a while and I live alone, I am never alone because he and our images when we were together and Saul and his image have me. One photo greets me, like a face in a crowd, and the other image, more familiar over time, also comes and goes. Both photos have been with me at peaks, in valleys, and on the plains in between. I pass by them daily and nightly, month to month, but I should only have one.”
Fire In Hand Media
2021
324 pages
ISBN (print): 9780578866536
ISBN (ebook): 9780578866574