Thin air. The threat of dropping into nothingness thousands of feet below. This is the climb Silvia Vasquez-Lavado braves in her page-turning, pulse-raising memoir following her journey to Mount Everest.A Latina hero in the elite macho tech world of Silicon Valley, privately, she was hanging by a thread. Deep in the throes of alcoholism, hiding her sexuality from her family, and repressing the abuse she’d suffered as a child, she started climbing. Something about the brute force required for the ascent― the risk and spirit and sheer size of the mountains and death’s close proximity―woke her up. She then took her biggest pain as a survivor to the biggest mountain: Everest.“The Mother of the World,” as it’s known in Nepal, allows few to reach her summit, but Silvia didn’t go alone. She gathered a group of young female survivors and led them to base camp alongside her. It was never easy. At times hair-raising, nerve-racking, and always challenging, Silvia remembers the acute anxiety of leading a group of novice climbers to Everest’s base, all the while coping with her own nerves of summiting. But, there were also moments of peace, joy, and healing with the strength of her fellow survivors and community propelling her forward.In the Shadow of the Mountain is a remarkable story of heroism, one which awakens in all of us a lust for adventure, an appetite for risk, and faith in our own resilience.

    Now, he’s forced to protect her.Stone Metcalfe embodies the Metcalfe legacy—blue eyes, an unfair amount of good looks, and hardcore patriot-laced character. But a foolish lapse in judgment dismantles his name and career. Humiliated and furious, he retreats to his mountain lodge to hide from media hounds and eke out a new life. However, one phone call from an old Army buddy upends Stone’s best-laid plans.Supermodel Brighton Buchanan had designers and men eating out of her hand until a terrible mistake trapped her in the soul-eating world of human trafficking. Years later, she is used by her captors to take down the best man she’s ever known. The man she loves. Hope lost, she’s unexpectedly freed—and thrown back into Stone’s life. Being forgiven is out of the question considering how much he hates her.Believing danger and her are one wrong move away, Brighton will do anything to keep him from being ruined again—even if it means going back to that life. As everything is falling apart and threats mount against Brighton, Stone realizes forgiveness is the easy part. Protecting her—and his heart—is another story.

    When she sends me over to redesign Race’s condo, I know what she’s up to. GeeBee wants us to get married, just like my sister and his brother did.But I’m not Race’s type. He’s a rockstar, and I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket if you held a gun to my head!The good news is that Race is on my side. I told him he’s not my type either. Together, we should be able to foil GeeBee’s plans to match us up.RaceApril is helping me win back the woman I lost. Only, I'm not so sure I want her back anymore.And now GeeBee is finding new matches for April. First, my old high school nemesis. And then my roommate.Doesn't she realize those guys aren't good enough for April?It’ll take an act of desperation to get April’s attention.But I know her weaknesses: flowers, chocolate and (most important of all) throw pillows!I just hope it’s not too late...You'll love this second book of the sweet romantic comedy series, Underground Granny Matchmakers, from USA Today bestselling author Tamie Dearen!This heartwarming, rockstar romance is the second of the Underground Granny Matchmaker romantic comedy series. Lighthearted, fun-filled stories of finding love with a little help from grandma!

    While modeling an elegant Edwardian trousseau gown, her mind is opened to a century-old crime of passion. Visions—seen through the eyes of the murdered bride—dispute local lore that claims the bridegroom committed the crime. Trey Dunmore doesn’t share her enthusiasm for mind-blowing visions, yet the appeal to clear his family’s tainted legacy compels him to join her in exploring the past. Aided by the dead woman’s clothing and diary, Tess and Trey discover that pursuing love in 1913 was just as thorny as modern day. As the list of murder suspects grows, the couple fears past emotions are influencing, and may ultimately derail, their own blossoming intimacy."MS. YOUNG HAS PENNED a wonderfully romantic mystery featuring a sleuth with the ability to see into the past using vintage clothing. The characters are delightful, and I'm looking forward to the next book in the series!" - Gayle Leeson, author of the GHOSTLY FASHIONISTA Mystery Series"IN DIVINE VINTAGE, Sandra Young walks us back into time to a murder/suicide mystery in 1913 that will keep the reader as spellbound as the lovely vintage clothing the author so adroitly describes. Well-written and woven with enough sensual tension to strum any romantic’s heartstrings, I give Divine Vintage FIVE STARS." - Catherine Lanigan - International Bestselling Author of over 45 published novels and non-fiction including: ROMANCING THE STONE; JEWEL OF THE NILE and Hallmark Channel’s THE SWEETEST HEART.

    

    You'll be swept away in this sweet romantic comedy where an uptight corporate executive is delightfully unwound by her surf-loving assistant.Elizabeth Mabel Matthews is in the middle of the biggest deal of her life when she gets a phone call from the activities director at her grandma’s retirement village. Grandma Nancy isn’t doing well and they want Elizabeth to come for a visit. She calls her maid to pack a bag and she’s on a plane that afternoon though her mind is back in the office.Chad Huntington’s surf shop is going under. He’ll do anything to save it, including work as a temporary personal assistant for the weekend.What these two don’t know, is that Grandma Nancy has a plan of her own and a team of matchmakers ready to jump in and help these two find love.Can the Secret Seven pull off a match made in Diamond Cove, or, will their efforts flounder at sea? Find out in this sweet romcom.

    Anthony, small-town editor Irene Ingram has a nose for news and an eye for clues.Irene Ingram has written for her father’s newspaper, the Progress Herald, ever since she could grasp a pencil. Now she’s editor in chief, which doesn’t sit well with the men in the newsroom. But proving her journalistic bona fides is the least of Irene’s worries when crime reporter Moe Bauer, on the heels of a hot tip, turns up dead at the foot of his cellar stairs. An accident? That’s what Police Chief Walt Turner thinks, and Irene is inclined to agree until she finds the note Moe discreetly left on her desk. He was on to a big story, he wrote. The robbery she’d assigned him to cover at Markowicz Hardware turned out to be something far more devious. A Jewish store owner in a small, provincial town, Sam Markowicz received a terrifying message from a stranger. Moe suspected that Sam is being threatened not only for who he is…but for what he knows. Tenacious Irene senses there’s more to the Markowicz story, which she is all but certain led to Moe’s murder. When she’s not filling up column inches with the usual small-town fare—locals in uniform, victory gardens, and scrap drives—she and her best friend, scrappy secretary Peggy Reardon, search for clues. If they can find the killer, it’ll be a scoop to stop the presses. But if they can’t, Irene and Peggy may face an all-too-literal deadline.

    

    Georgie and her family have had a hard time since her father died, but she and her mother Gina and sisters Tommy and Stevie are making a new start in the small town of Beulah, Idaho where Gina’s wealthy friend Ellen has set them up to help renovate an old stone schoolhouse. Georgie experiences a variety of disturbances—the town is familiar from dreams and she seems to be experiencing her mother’s memory of the place, not to mention the creepy ghost in the schoolhouse basement—but she is able to maintain, in her own laconic way, until she notices that her little sister Stevie also has the gift. Stevie is in danger from a malevolent ghost, and Georgie tries to help, but soon Georgie is the one in danger.

    Reevaluating his rocky marriage in the wake of his husband’s infidelity and with little else to do, he decides to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, where he runs into the long-lost characters of his youth.Jeremy, his first love, is now married with two children after having been incarcerated and recovering from addiction. Paul, who Andrés has long suspected of having killed a man in a homophobic attack, is now an Evangelical minister and father of five. And Simone, Andrés’s best friend, is in a psychiatric institution following a diagnosis of schizophrenia. During this short stay, Andrés confronts these relationships, the death of his brother, and the many sacrifices his parents made to offer him a better life.A novel about the essential nature of community in maintaining one’s own health, The Town of Babylon is an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity, a call to reevaluate the ties of societal bonds and the systems in which they are forged.

    One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him as a baby, as she did so many of the village’s children. Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina’s home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place. Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, civility and savagery, will prove to be very thin indeed.

    Textured with mountains―a folkloric goddess-prison, Yushan, mother, men, self―and peppered with shapeshifting creatures, spirits, and gods, the landscape of Jennifer Huang’s poems is at once mystical and fleshy, a “myth a mess of myself.” Sensuously, Huang depicts each of these not as things to claim but as topographies to behold and hold.Here, too, is another kind of mythology. Set to the music of “beating hearts / through objects passed down,” the poems travel through generations―among Taiwan, China, and America―cataloging familial wounds and beloved stories. A grandfather’s smile shining through rain, baby bok choy in a child’s bowl, a slap felt decades later―the result is a map of a present-day life, reflected through the past.Return Flight is a thrumming debut that teaches us how history harrows and heals, often with the same hand; how touch can mean “purple” and “blue” as much as it means intimacy; and how one might find a path toward joy not by leaving the past in the past, but by “[keeping a] hand on these memories, / to feel them to their ends.”

    His wife died. He lost his job. His brother is on the west coast. But something else, something different, something new is waiting for him.In uptown Charlotte, the lives of five strangers are bound together as tightly as the twisted metal frame of the bicycle at the center of a horrible hit-and-run accident.A homeless woman watches as a minister tries to comfort the young computer coder who believes he killed the cyclist, while an exhausted nurse and a power-driven CEO slip off into the night.As Jim begins to rebuild his life, a strange vagrant helps guide him to the five people involved in the accident, revealing the dangerous secrets and vulnerabilities threatening to destroy each one. Someone has a gun. Someone has been physically abused. A relationship desperately needs mending. Someone will die.Jim finds himself in situations with his new friends he never expected, giving him opportunities he never saw coming, providing new meaning in ways he never could have imagined.Filled with tragedy and promise, The Awakening of Jim Bishop is a powerful and moving story of loss, hope and healing sure to provoke thought long after the last page is turned.

    

    Three weeks later, when it finally stops growing, it's nearly two-and-a-half miles tall, and has been determined to be an active volcano.As the volcano grows and then looms over New York, an eight-year-old boy in Mexico City finds himself transported 500 years into the past, where he witnesses the fall of the Aztec Empire; a Nigerian scholar in Tokyo studies a folktale about a woman of fire who descends a mountain and destroys an entire village; a white trans writer in Jersey City struggles to write a sci-fi novel about a thriving civilization on an impossible planet; a nurse tends to Syrian refugees in Greece while grappling with the trauma of living through the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan; a nomadic farmer in Mongolia is stung by a bee, magically transforming him into a green, thorned, flowering creature that aspires to connect every living thing into its consciousness.With its riveting and audacious vision, My Volcano is a tapestry on fire, a distorted and cinematic new work from the fiercely talented John Elizabeth Stintzi.

    In the same land where oil—the largest reserve in the world—sits so close to the surface that it bubbles from the ground, where gold and other mineral resources are abundant, and where the government spends billions of dollars on public works projects that go abandoned, the supermarket shelves are bare and the hospitals have no medicine. Twenty percent of the population has fled, creating the largest refugee exodus in the world, rivaling only war-torn Syria’s crisis. Venezuela’s collapse affects all of Latin America, as well as the United States and the international community.Republicans like to point to Venezuela as the perfect example of the emptiness of socialism, but it is a better model for something else: the destructive potential of charismatic populist leadership. The ascent of Hugo Chávez was a precursor to the emergence of strongmen that can now be seen all over the world, and the success of the corrupt economy he presided over only lasted while oil sold for more than $100 a barrel. Chávez’s regime and policies, which have been reinforced under Nicolás Maduro, squandered abundant resources and ultimately bankrupted the country.Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse is a fluid combination of journalism, memoir, and history that chronicles Venezuela’s tragic journey from petro-riches to poverty. Author William Neuman witnessed it all firsthand while living in Caracas and serving as the New York Times Andes Region Bureau Chief. His book paints a clear-eyed, riveting, and highly personal portrait of the crisis unfolding in real time, with all of its tropical surrealism, extremes of wealth and suffering, and gripping drama. It is also a heartfelt reflection of the country’s great beauty and vibrancy—and the energy, passion, and humor of its people, even under the most challenging circumstances.

    Her well-appointed home is in a fashionable Los Angeles neighborhood. She has a kind and successful husband who makes her laugh. She celebrates the accomplishments of friends and acquaintances, is widely regarded as "nice," and after years of struggle, is finally making a name for herself in Hollywood. But the successful, confident, and gracious face she presents to the outside world can often feel like a deception to Maggie, who's long grappled with mental illness and feelings of inadequacy.Enter Joanna Hergert, an autistic middle-aged woman living with her elderly mother in subsidised housing. When Maggie's husband, Jim, strikes up an acquaintance with Joanna and her mother outside a local restaurant one afternoon, Maggie is quick to befriend the pair—despite Joanna's not-at-all subtle romantic fixation on Jim—prompted, in part, by a less-than-admirable desire to be seen as generous. However, what starts as a charity project, soon blossoms into a complicated, intimate, and beautiful lifelong friendship that will challenge Maggie to confront many of the things she's tried to avoid about herself, her privilege, and the trade-offs she's made to live life on her own terms.Engrossing, heart-breaking, moving, and at times very funny, Easy Street is part midlife coming-of-age, part buddy comedy about an unlikely pair of women, and part dramedy about embracing an openness of spirit, the strength of the families we fashion, finding peace with the choices we make, and, above all, learning to be compassionate with ourselves.

    Sipress, a dreamer and obsessive drawer, goes hazy when it comes to the ceaselessly imparted lessons-on-life from his father, the meticulous, upwardly mobile proprietor of Revere Jewelers, and in the face of the angsty expectations of his migraine-prone mother.  With self-deprecation, wit, and artistry, Sipress paints his hapless place in his indelibly dysfunctional family, from the time he was tricked by his unreliable older sister into rocketing his pet turtle out his twelfth-floor bedroom window, to the moment he walks away from a Harvard PhD program in Russian history to begin his journey as a professional cartoonist. In What’s So Funny?—reminiscent of the masterly, humane recall of Roger Angell and the brainy humor of Roz Chast—Sipress's cartoons appear with spot-on precision, inducing delightful Aha moments in answer to the perennial question aimed at cartoonists: Where do you get your ideas?

    But that might be a good thing. Sabrina, a small-town academic, spends her days teaching and hanging out with the kind but somewhat mysterious best friend she met a few years ago. Her life is steady, maybe even a little dull. Until her friend’s family arrives. Suddenly, Fae is no longer a fictional place. Magic is real. And, oddly enough, Sabrina’s knowledge of a 1634 play may hold the key to saving Nin and her realm. Nin landed in Kentucky after escaping her captor, the tyrant she once loved. The human realm is calming for her, with moments of joy, but she hates how she hides who and what she is from Sabrina. When Nin’s family unexpectedly arrives at her greenhouse, a series of events force her to share her secrets and grapple with her place in Fae — past, present, and future. Sabrina and Nin must trust in their friendship, themselves, and John Milton’s Comus to survive in Fae and save the realm from ruin. If they cannot, terror and destruction will reign far beyond the Fae Palace gates.

    Strange thins have begun to happen at her office that autumn. It is a season characterized by dissonance between technology and humanity, by her past in the east and an off-key present in the west. Just when she finally wraps her fingers around a career break Bushra spent her whole adult life working towards, bombshell corruption scandals plunge the city into sudden unrest and drag her into an absurd and sinister world of holograms, private detectives, street riots, cryptocurrencies, coverups, AI, and the shadowy bodies that pull the strings unseen.Trosclair is one of a talented generation of novelists coming of age in a world their elder writers have been fearing was in descent throughout their own early years, and are meeting their reading public at a moment when dystopia is mundane quotidian. His sentences and descriptions display a talent that is put to use to engage and express an urgent need for the humans of the degenerate wealthy western world to bring to account and eventually, one hopes, halt the deterioration of enlightenment values in a post-capitalist world that sees the humans drifting from that which binds them to the life left on their planet.