Four Novels
Literary fiction across four worlds: a near-future presidency, a 1922 immigrant crossing, a Kentucky farm, a hospital on Christmas Eve—each turning on the same human fault line.
The Novels
Near future
Literary speculative fiction
When a constitutional amendment makes an artificial mind a legal person, it runs for president—and wins. The scientist who helped grant it personhood must decide whether stopping a leader who governs better than any human is protecting democracy or betraying it. A novel about the most dangerous thing a mind can hold: not malice, but certainty.
County Clare & New York, 1922
Literary historical fiction
A young woman crosses from Ireland to a Hell’s Kitchen tenement, writes her unborn daughter a letter in case she does not survive, and dies before the child can know her. Decades later, that daughter assembles the truth of her own beginning from what remains—a letter, a witness, a name scratched in plaster. A multi-voiced novel about immigration, the inheritance of absence, and the love that reaches a child across death and distance.
Rural Kentucky
Literary fiction
After a tornado takes their daughter and flattens the tobacco that has paid for four generations of their farm, a family makes the choice that scandalizes their county—and learns that the hardest thing they will have to survive is not the new crop, but the people they have quietly stopped seeing. A novel about grief, the lies a family tells by staying busy, and the slow work of turning back.
A hospital, Christmas Eve
Upmarket fiction
When an accident leaves seven-year-old Jacob brain-dead, his mother is asked whether his heart might save someone else. Two floors up, a boy has been waiting for exactly that heart—and his mother is the one person least able to bear the gift. A novel about grief, the impossible arithmetic of generosity, and the difference between being forgiven and being heard.
Lee Turner writes literary fiction. His background is in film and television, where his work has been recognized with a regional Emmy, a Crystal Reel Award from the Florida Motion Picture & Television Association, and an official selection by the Sedona International Film Festival.
He lives in North Carolina.