Sandcherry Press

Children's picture book

Otto & Henry: The Warm Spot

written by Alex Jokela · illustrated by Zainab

Henry is a gentle comforter with a soft harrumph for everything. Otto is a retired show dog, an expert popcorn catcher, and the enthusiastic announcer of the mail, dinner, squirrels, and just about anything else. As different as two dogs can be, they are the very best of friends, happiest curled nose to tail in the warm spot on the floor.

When Henry goes on ahead, Otto returns to their golden place each afternoon, where the warmth feels like more than sunlight alone can explain. Inspired by two real dogs, Otto & Henry: The Warm Spot is a tender, gently funny story about friendship, pet loss, and the love that remains.

For children ages 7–11 to share with a grown-up · Hardcover ISBN 979-8-9951255-7-0

Literary fiction

Northern Lights, Empty Pockets

a novel by Alex Jokela

Sarah Mitchell arrives on Minnesota's Iron Range with nothing but her nine-year-old daughter and whatever fit in the Honda. Fleeing a collapsed marriage in the suburbs, she takes the only job she can find — night custodian at the regional hospital — and moves into Section 8 housing in a town that's been losing people and purpose since the mines went quiet. But in the church basements and break rooms of the Range, among retired miners with ruined lungs and neighbors who share what little they have, Sarah discovers a community that survives not on prosperity but on stubbornness, generosity, and the unspoken agreements between people who understand what it means to go without. As the seasons turn from frozen February to brief summer and back toward the long dark, she is drawn into a struggle to protect the people around her — and finds that the life she never planned may be the one she was always meant to build.

Hardcover ISBN 979-8-9951255-4-9 · Ebook, hardcover, and unabridged audiobook

Fiction · Forthcoming

The Long Light Going

a novel by Alex Jokela

For three months in 1996, Troy, Pete, and Alex rode from sunup to sundown across the rust-red trails of their Iron Range town — jumping the fences onto mining-company land, swimming in the cold flooded pits, cameras on their backs and the whole long northern daylight ahead of them. All summer they chased the ghost of North Hibbing: the town that was jacked up off its own foundations and rolled two miles south when the company found ore beneath it. To three boys on bikes it was a lost city to be found, hidden in the brush at the edge of their own. They were certain the world would last forever.