Novels

Pepper’s Ghost

SECOND EDITION AVAILABLE 22 FEBRUARY 2024

2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist for Contemporary Fiction

Peper's Ghost second edition cover by William Auten

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)

386 pages

ISBN (print): 9798986092737

ISBN (ebook): 9798986092744

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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

October by William Auten novel cover

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.

William Auten – October

Fire In Hand Media

2021

324 pages

ISBN (print): 9780578866536

ISBN (ebook): 9780578866574

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In Another Sun

In Another Sun tells the story of Vanessa Ochoa, the American-born only child of Mexican immigrants, who thinks she knows what she wants–until she gets it. The nonlinear narrative weaves in and out of key moments of her youth and adult life, including her decision to leave where and with whom she grew up, her successful ascension at a Denver PR firm, and a crisis that stirs her to redefine her life. This lyrical novel explores the themes of time and fate; family and complex characters; the emotions of place and memory; and hopeful perseverance against odds in pursuit of fickle desire.

Tortoise Books

2020

312 pages

ISBN (print): 9781948954105

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Praise

In Another Sun tells the story of Vanessa Ochoa in a simultaneously urgent and unhurried voice, as she searches for a bridge between the known and the unknown in a too-short life. The novel pulses between the past and future, disappointment and possibility, with the steady surge of the Pacific toward which Vanessa is steadily aimed. In chronicling her journey with grace and empathy, Auten also shows how the American Dream, hatched in hope, can sour within a generation. It’s 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

William Auten’s In Another Sun burns with haunting fire; it reminds us that our lives are often only truly experienced in fragments. We exist through the shards of our memories, through snippets of conversations, 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. I was reminded of C.E. Morgan and that is high praise. Read this book.
—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