About The Books

Dead End Street: Tales from the Neighborhood

What if the street you call home is the very place where your deepest secrets, struggles, and memories are paved?

In the late 1970s, Emma and Philip Willson pull up to Bennett Street, a quiet, unpaved dead-end cul-de-sac in Michigan. Seeking a modest, peaceful place to raise their young family, they integrate into a tight-knit community that feels like its own self-contained world. But behind the neatly mowed lawns, birthday parties, and suburban charm lies a deeply complex tapestry of human lives.

Dead-End Street is an evocative, beautifully written portrait of a neighborhood over the decades. Through a series of richly drawn, interconnected vignettes, you will step behind closed doors to witness the raw, unfiltered realities of Bennett Street’s residents:

The Nowaks and the Canadians: Neighbors who fiercely guard their autonomy, finding that the physical dead end perfectly suits their desire to stay hidden from the world.
The Stonewalls and the Lockwoods: Families cocooned in their own private griefs, attempting to break away from the neighborhood only to find themselves pulled back by its invisible gravity.
The Generational Cycles: Families trapped in silent loops of poverty, illiteracy, and broken dreams, fighting to carve a path out of a literal and figurative dead end.

Spanning years of changing seasons, bittersweet nostalgia, and unexpected tragedies, this book explores how the spaces we inhabit shape who we become. Perfect for fans of thoughtful, character-driven literary fiction and intimate community dramas, Dead-End Street is a poignant reminder that no neighborhood is truly ordinary, and every house holds a story waiting to be told.

Discover the secrets of Bennett Street. Scroll up and grab your copy today.

To the Point: Short Tales of a Wandering Mind

Concise yet full of meaning, To the Point offers snapshots of immigrant life, a garage sale misunderstood, the first Thanksgiving dinner, the loneliness of crafting paper flowers, or the humor of broken English. These brief stories capture moments of adaptation and survival, told with warmth, wit, and emotional clarity.

To the Point reminds us that it is often in the smallest details, a conversation, a tradition, a misunderstanding, that the richness of life and the essence of belonging can be found.

Stories From a Yellow Pad

In this powerful collection of short stories, Romana turns everyday lives into narratives that are anything but ordinary. From “The American Story” to “The Piano Teacher,” she portrays characters caught between love and loss, resilience and vulnerability, memory and change.

Each story balances realism with reflection, reminding readers that behind every person is a history waiting to be heard. With sharp detail and deep compassion, Stories from a Yellow Pad paints a portrait of human experience that resonates across generations and cultures.

Whispers: Tales That My Family Weaved and Other Stories

A collection of autofiction rooted in heritage and memory, Whispers captures the flavors of Romana’s childhood in Zagreb, the resilience of her maternal family living in villages and her paternal family residing in cities and abroad. Written with honesty and tenderness, these stories weave together family lore, personal history, and cultural tradition. They show how the past, no matter how distant, continues to shape our identity in the present.

Whispers is both a preservation of Croatian roots and a meditation on what it means to live between two worlds, carrying your homeland within you while building a new life far away.