Until one woman dared venture onto Mackenzie's mountain, determined to tame the rugged half-breed.Joe "Breed" Mackenzie: Like his father before him, he was as wild as the wind...and not about to settle down. Yet one equally stubborn blonde - bent on reversing Mackenzie's mission - would stop at nothing to make Joe her own.

    But she is a good teacher and she wants Wolf Mackenzie's son back in school. And after one heated confrontation with the boy's father, she knows father and son have changed her life forever.Still paying for a crime he didn't commit, Wolf Mackenzie has a chip on his shoulder the size of Wyoming. But prim-and-proper Mary Elizabeth Potter doesn't see Wolf as the dangerous half-breed the town has branded him. Somehow she sees him as a good, decent, honest man. A man who could love...Wolf's not sure he or the town of Ruth, Wyoming is ready for the taming of Wolf Mackenzie.

    . Through it all, will Christy keep her promise to her parents not to do anything she'll regret?

    But something about gutsy, down-on-her-luck grocery clerk Christine Palmer and her two little kids got to him. Crazy as it was, he carted them home with him, and soon found that providing for them made him happier than he'd been in years. Suddenly he felt like a father--and husband--again.Still, Chris was bound to get back on her own two feet, and once that happened, might not need his support anymore. Would she still want his love? Mike braved danger daily. Why was it so terrifying when his heart, not his life, was at risk?

    As the school year begins, her grades are up and she's even landed a coveted spot on the high school Brain Bowl team. She and her best friend, Jory Delaney, are determined to have the best junior year ever.Then suddenly Melissa must face some devastating news about her health. At first she refuses to accept the doctor's diagnosis, bust as her illness gets worse she cannot deny the truth. The caring and closeness Melissa feels toward her family and especially Jory help her find the inner strength and courage to face the mysteries of living and dying.

    Against the mythical dreamscape of America, Auster brilliantly weaves the bizarre narrative of Marco Stanley Fogg, an orphan searching for love, his father, and the key to the riddle of his origin and fate.

    As Marco sets out on a journey from the canyons of Manhattan to the deserts of Utah, he encounters a gallery of characters and a series of events as rich and surprising as any in modern fiction.Beginning during the summer that men first walked on the moon, and moving backward and forward in time to span three generations, Moon Palace is propelled by coincidence and memory, and illuminated by marvelous flights of lyricism and wit. Here is the most entertaining and moving novel yet from an author well known for his breathtaking imagination.

    (Nancy Pearl)

    Or romance, for that matter. She is weeks away from opening her own catering business, the most important part of her plan to provide her certified genius daughter Patty with all the wonderful things she deserves.Except Patty doesn't want to go to a fancy boarding school. She wants a father and when she meets bartender Murphy O'Rourke at her fourth grade Career Day presentation, she knows she's met the man of her mother's dreams!But can she convince her Mrs. Scrooge of a mom that it was time to give Christmas -- and love -- a second chance?Acclaim for the novels of Barbara Bretton“Bretton’s characters are always real and their conflicts believable.”— Chicago Sun-Times“Soul warming... A powerful relationship drama [for] anyone who enjoys a passionate look inside the hearts and souls of the prime players.”— Midwest Book Review“[Bretton] excels in her portrayal of the sometimes sweet, sometimes stifling ties of a small community. The town’s tight network of loving, eccentric friends and family infuses the tale with a gently comic note that perfectly balances the darker dramas of the romance.”— Publishers Weekly“A tender love story about two people who, when they find something special, will go to any length to keep it.”— Booklist“Honest, witty... absolutely unforgettable.”— Rendezvous“A classic adult fairy tale.”— Affaire de Coeur“Dialogue flows easily and characters spring quickly to life.”— Rocky Mountain News

    . . Free spirit Veronique Delacroix has a reputation for being reckless and for thumbing her nose at society’s rules. But her wild ways mask the vulnerability she keeps hidden. After all, with an impenetrable wall around her heart, how could it be broken?Brandon Rhodes is New Orleans’ version of royalty, his life steeped in the traditions of high society, Mardi Gras and privilege. His father’s sudden death leaves him in control of his family’s retail empire, but also with a vague restlessness. A sense that something is missing in his life. Veronique and Brandon’s chance meeting leads to a seductive game of one-upmanship. Their flirtatious sparring seems harmless enough until it becomes a passionate winner-takes-all game in which their hearts are the ultimate prize.

    He discovers he has to fight their suspicions of him, and also falls in love with Mairi, a local woman.

    as a scholar and critic, Tomas Venclova is a gifted poet whose work has remained largely unknown to an English-speaking audience. This collection of fifty-one poems is as distinctive as it is finely crafted. Also included is a foreword by Joseph Brodsky and an exchange between Venclova and Czeslaw Milosz.

    -- Atlanta Constitution

    My Cooking Coach is a 500 page cornucopia of cooking knowledge that provides, as its slogan states, "Cooking Knowledge at Your Fingertips!" All of this cooking knowledge comes from a revised version of The Essential Cook, by Charles Delmar, winner of the prestigious "Writings" award from the International Assn. of Culinary Professionals (IACP). This new edition has been re-named and re-formatted in bite-sized pieces so it can be read as a quick reference from its Glossary/Index of more than 1,000 cooking terms, an important consideration for today's cooks who don't seem to have the time or the patience to read a textbook. Of course, it can also be read "Top-Down" as a book that one reviewer for the first edition described as "A really good, and informative, read." From Part One, First You Steal a Chicken: How to Plan, Select, Store, Prepare, Cook, Flavor and Serve most foods, through Part Three: How to Set a Dining Table and Other Facts of Life, with How Good Cooks Do It: Basic Cooking Methods and Techniques in between, My Cooking Coach uses clear, direct language and more than 400 informative illustrations, along with "Master Recipes," to explain the basic How-Tos and Whys of foods and cooking. There are no conventional recipes in My Cooking Coach. Rather, the author uses what he calls "Master Recipes" that provide step-by-step instructions for cooking almost any food you can think of by any of the basic cooking methods usually used to cook that food: Dry Heat, Liquids, and Fats, i.e. Frying. "Master recipes are the themes, of which recipes are but individual variations," says author Delmar.

    

    The novel is set in the 'debatable lands' between Scotland and England but explores more elusive borders between waking and dreaming, sanity and madness, myth and reality, and the unsettling landscape between our imagined pasts and hoped for futures.Thomas and Naomi are on a journey through a world that has experienced catastrophic change. Early reviewers, writing amid the Cold War, placed the story in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust. The author offers no such certainty. The plaintive but unexplained references to 'before the world changed' resonate with a menace all the more unnerving in its ambiguity. Through this regenerating landscape - the previously blighted 'empty lands' - Thomas and Naomi find their journey turns full circle, returning them to their starting point as changed people, with new understandings of friendship and belonging. As with every quest there is a grail and their grail is music. Its rediscovery is a metaphor for that Golden Age we all need to believe existed 'before the world changed'. .."......powerfully convincing in its blend of medievalism and post-modern disillusion..." Douglas Gifford