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When an assisted living facility goes into lockdown due to COVID, a feisty widow decides to leave for home, and invites a nursing assistant and her two children to live with her. They become an unlikely pandemic pack, shedding their former armor to emerge as their truer selves, examining questions of marriage, identity and family.

That’s the premise behind Katrina Kittle’s poignant novel, Morning in This Broken World (Lake Union Publishing), which releases Sept. 1. Goodreads is providing 100 ebooks to readers who enter a giveaway before the end of July. Details here.

Jessica Strawser, author of A Million Reasons Why, calls the book “a heartfelt take on the family we’re born with, the family we choose, and the messy, beautiful intersections between the two.” Adriana Trigiani, author of The Good Left Undone, describes it as “a novel that celebrates love and hope and why we matter to one another.”

Katrina is the author of four novels for adults, Traveling Light, Two Truths and a Lie, The Kindness of Strangers and The Blessings of the Animals, and one novel for young adults, Reasons to Be Happy. The Kindness of Strangers was the winner of the 2006 Great Lakes Book Award for Fiction.

She teaches creative writing at the University of Dayton and for Word’s Worth Writing Connections. In 2022, she served as a keynoter at the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop, where she is part of the faculty.

Katrina lives near Dayton, Ohio, with her fella, cat, beagle and out-of-control garden. She has a thing for goats, gardening and going barefoot — and is addicted to coffee, pedicures and Indian food.