Novelist · Storyteller

Stories of courage, mischief & growing up—at every age.

From a nursing home that refuses to go quietly to two farm boys facing the Pacific War, Anthony G. Bottini writes warm, wry, carefully researched fiction for adults and young readers.

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Dear Nearly Departed cover
Featured novel

Dear Nearly Departed

Sixty-two residents of Spoon River Care Center are about to be cashed out for riverfront condos. They picked the wrong retirement home.

Rallying to defend their sanctuary is an improbable band of formidable elders—a pompous retired neurosurgeon, his razor-tongued wife, an instinctive master carpenter, a vivacious social organizer, and an enigmatic resident watching everything—aided by a savvy nursing aide and a defiant chef.

Darkly comic, suspenseful, and fiercely tender, Dear Nearly Departed is a triumphant celebration of late-life dignity, cunning solidarity, and the unstoppable power of those who refuse to go quietly.

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Dear Nearly Departed cover

Dear Nearly Departed

Sixty-two residents of Spoon River Care Center are about to be cashed out for riverfront condos. They picked the wrong retirement home.

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My Life As A Fish

A Minnesota boy, a young walleye named Buddy, and a year of learning to let go.

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A young adult series

Brothers Through the Storm

An Ocean Away cover

An Ocean Away

Brothers Through the Storm · Book 1

Two farm boys, one Hawaiian fort, and the morning of December 7th, 1941.

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The Far Island

Brothers Through the Storm · Book 2

Guadalcanal, October 1942. Ollie and Sandy and a heavy machine gun hold the line.

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From Heaven to Hell

Brothers Through the Storm · Book 3

Bougainville, 1944. Ollie goes back for a wounded friend and pays a heavy price. Coming soon.

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Works in progress

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Creative nonfiction · In progress

Cushing Goes to War

A Surgeon's Journey Through the Great War, 1915–1918

In 1915, Harvey Cushing was America's most celebrated brain surgeon. He left his Boston operating room for the battlefields of France, where he led a volunteer hospital unit and operated on wounded soldiers under the guns of the Western Front.

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The Unquiet Wife cover
Nonfiction · In progress

The Unquiet Wife: A Military Widow's Search for Truth in the Vietnam War

A military wife takes on the U.S. Army over her missing husband's remains, and her fight changes how America identifies its war dead.

On December 21, 1972, an AC-130A Spectre gunship was shot down over Laos with fourteen men aboard. One of them was Major Thomas C. Hart III. His wife, Anne, was left to raise six children while she waited for answers.

In 1985 the Army said it had found him. It handed Anne a box of bone fragments and told her to bury her husband, but she had read the science and refused to accept the identification. She took the government to court, carried her case to Congress, and secured an independent review that showed the identification couldn't be scientifically supported. All along she was warned that her fight could endanger her husband if he was still alive. She pressed on anyway.

Thirty-one years later, DNA testing confirmed the remains were Tom Hart's. It also confirmed what Anne had argued all along: the methods used in 1985 could never have proven it.

Drawn from court records, congressional testimony, and news archives, The Unquiet Wife is the true story of a shy military wife who became one of the most determined voices in the POW/MIA movement. Her four-decade fight helped bring scientific accountability to the way the nation brings its soldiers home.

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