Barbara Braun Associates, Inc.

Publishers interested in receiving a manuscript or proposal for any of these titles, please email barbara@​barbarabraunagency.com.

CONCRETE PLANET by Robert Courland
It’s the most common building material in the world today, but the way we make and use it now is environmentally harmful and needlessly subject to quick decay. Courland’s fascinating account of the history of concrete and its pioneers suggests ways it can once again be the reliable, long-lasting substance it was for the Romans who developed it.

LIVING TREASURES
by Yang Huang
A young Chinese university student, inspired by the revolutionary fervor that led to the demonstrations in Tianamen Square, makes a personal sacrifice on behalf of a woman being persecuted by the one-child-per-family law.

VISIBLE SIGNS
by Grace Marcus
A young nun who has been left money by her father leaves the convent to try to ease the suffering of the poor on her own and becomes deeply involved in the unhappy marriage of her best friend.

RED WOMEN
by Katherine Karlin
It is 1936 in New York, and four girls full of youthful idealism, Ruth, Greta, Shirley and Miriam, meet at a Communist-organized rally for striking garment workers. Karlin's panoramic novel revisits them in 1956, when it is obvious an informer has betrayed Ruth to the Congressional Un-American Activities Committee, and again in a down-at-heels New York twenty years later, when each has made some kind of accommodation with a new way of living and thinking. Compassionate, often moving, sometimes comic and always hugely readable, Karlin's novel speaks to politically active women everywhere.

UNDER THE SPELL OF JANE AUSTEN
by Patrice Hannon
Isabella Fitzwilliam (Fitz to her friends) teaches Eng Lit (including the works of Jane Austen) in a New York university. Too clear-headed and sensible to fall easily in love, she lives vicariously through the often unhappy affairs of her Manhattan friends—-until she goes to England to address a Jane Austen conference in the seaside town where one of Jane’s novels was set.
What happens to her there turns her life upside down and forces her to re-evaluate some of her most cherished notions. This delightful up-market romance is the debut novel of Patrice Hannon, expert Janeite and author of “Dear Jane Austen” and “101 Things You Didn’t Know About Jane Austen".

GUTENBERG’S APPRENTICE
by Alix Christie
The first printed Bible in 1454 revolutionized the world of learning and made mass-produced books possible. Johannes Gutenberg is usually credited with this invention, but Christie's compelling debut novel, based on extensive research, tells the true story: the Bible was as much the accomplishment of its namesake as of his extraordinary assistant, Peter Schoeffer. It is set in a medieval world strikingly like our own, which is also threatened by financial chaos, incursions from the Muslim East, clashes between Church and state, and by a new digital technology completely altering the transmission of information as we know it.

YOU'D BE CRAZY NOT TO LOVE IT HERE: STORIES
by Michael Schiavone
The author of “Call Me When You Land” began as a short story writer, and this dazzling collection shows his antic imagination at its height. Alternately wildly funny and achingly melancholy—sometimes both at once—these stories (which have appeared in Glimmer Train, The Mississippi Review, and numerous other magazines) embrace a virtuosic variety of characters and settings. All they have in common are huge readability and the knack of constant surprise.

THE GIRLS OF SANTA CLAUS LANE
by Sandi Tan
The surprising personalities and relationships of a group of oddly assorted people living in a distant suburb of Los Angeles star in this witty, hip and ultimately touching novel by Singapore-born film-maker Tan. With a flawlessly contemporary eye and ear for the California melting pot, she spins a hugely readable and often startling tale that is by turns mysterious, sexy and funny.

"Splendid and wonderfully readable."
- James Ellroy

"There are many ways to be lost in multicultural America, and Sandi Tan has an unerring eye for all of them. By turns hilarious, sexy and shrewd, this novel has more surprising turns and collisions with reality than a bumper car gone wild."
- Phillip Lopate