Author Lynnda Pollio’s life as a busy New Yorker abruptly changes when she unexpectedly hears the mystical, elderly voice of Addie Mae Aubrey, a Southern, African American woman. Her first words, “It’s not what happened to me that matters,” begin a spirited remembering of Addie Mae’s teenage years in the late 1930s rural south and the hard learned wisdom Addie Mae asks Lynnda to share. As women from different times and places, together they embark on an uncommon journey. Narrated by Addie Mae Aubrey, Trusting the Currents carries living messages of faith, courage, forgiveness, and the uneasy search for one’s place in life. Beginning at age eleven with the arrival of beautiful, mysterious cousin Jenny and her shadowy stepfather, Uncle Joe, Trusting the Currents explores Addie Mae’s reluctant awakening. As Jenny, the story’s mystical center introduces Addie Mae to the spiritual world, a caring teacher, Miss Blanchard, guides Addie Mae with the power of reading. Romantic love enters her life for the first time with Rawley, and we experience how Addie Mae’s emerging sense of self compels her to a life-altering decision. Throughout the story her mother remains an unwavering source of love, even when fear and evil shake their lives. Unfathomable loss and rising trust in the “Invisibles” not only transforms Addie Mae’s budding life, but leads to the author’s own spiritual awakening. This unlikely pair becomes partners in showing us how to trust our own life currents. Trusting the Currents represents a new literary genre of conscious storytelling, engaging high spiritual frequencies that resonate with the reader’s heart, guiding them deep into their own truth and transformation.

    . .Generations of Sassers have made moonshine in the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina. Their history is recorded in a leather-bound journal that belongs to Jessie Sasser's daddy, but Jessie wants no part of it. As far as she's concerned, moonshine caused her mother's death a dozen years ago.Her father refuses to speak about her mama, or about the day she died. But Jessie has a gnawing hunger for the truth--one that compels her to seek comfort in food. Yet all her self-destructive behavior seems to do is feed what her school's gruff but compassionate nurse describes as the "monster" inside Jessie.Resenting her father's insistence that moonshining runs in her veins, Jessie makes a plan to destroy the stills, using their neighbors as scapegoats. Instead, her scheme escalates an old rivalry and reveals long-held grudges. As she endeavors to right wrongs old and new, Jessie's loyalties will bring her to unexpected revelations about her family, her strengths--and a legacy that may provide her with the answers she has been longing for.

    Then her father, a legal U.S. resident for nearly two decades, is suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi sympathizer. The family is sent to an internment camp in Texas, where, behind the armed guards and barbed wire, Elise feels stripped of everything beloved and familiar, including her own identity.The only thing that makes the camp bearable is meeting fellow internee Mariko Inoue, a Japanese-American teen from Los Angeles, whose friendship empowers Elise to believe the life she knew before the war will again be hers. Together in the desert wilderness, Elise and Mariko hold tight the dream of being young American women with a future beyond the fences.

    Bennett's sensational trial pitted an aggressive, mercurial county prosecutor against the author's father, a civil trial attorney who had never before defended anyone for murder. The book not only recreates the tension and excitement of this courtroom battle, but also highlights the uncertain edge that often divides guilt from innocence. The author was ten years old when he answered the phone late at night when Bennett called his father from jail, seeking his legal representation. Forty years later and long after his father's death, the author found the Bennett file in the bottom of his mother's closet. From the moment he began reading the papers, the long-forgotten drama cast a spell on him. As he uncovered more and more of the facts, the story he had known as a child disappeared, replaced by one far different. The Edge of Innocence takes the reader through the criminal justice system and ultimately to the trial where the reader, like a juror, must sift through competing claims and conflicting evidence. Full of twists and turns and colorful characters, The Edge of Innocence is all the more entertaining because it tells a true story.

    Their lives are forever entwined by their love of the same man, the brilliant and compassionate Dr. Josef Samson.From the earliest, rough-and-tumble days of San Francisco, through the devastation of the Great War in Berlin and the terrors of Vichy France, and then to a new yet uncertain life in New York City, their stories span the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. In the end, one of these women will complete the life of the other and make a startling discovery about the husband they share.

    Framed by the oil shale bust and the real estate boom, by protests against Reagan and against the Gulf War, The Optimistic Decade takes us into the lives of five unforgettable characters and is a sweeping novel about idealism, love, class, and a piece of land that changes everyone who lives on it. There is Caleb Silver, the beloved founder of the back-to-the-land camp Llamalo, who is determined to teach others to live simply. There are the ranchers, Don and his son, Donnie, who gave up their land to Caleb and who now want it back. There is Rebecca Silver, determined to become an activist like her father and undone by the spell of both Llamalo and new love; and there is David, a teenager who has turned Llamalo into his personal religion. Heather Abel’s novel is a brilliant exploration of the bloom and fade of idealism and how it forever changes one’s life.

    Jean-Luc is a man on the run from his past. The scar on his face is a small price to pay for surviving the horrors of Nazi occupation in France. Now, he has a new life in California, a family. He never expected the past to come knocking on his door.Paris, 1944. A young Jewish woman's past is torn apart in a heartbeat. Herded onto a train bound for Auschwitz, in an act of desperation she entrusts her most precious possession to a stranger. All she has left now is hope.On a darkened platform, two destinies become intertwined, and the choices each person makes will change the future in ways neither could have imagined.Told from alternating perspectives, While Paris Slept reflects on the power of love, resilience, and courage when all seems lost. Exploring the strength of family ties, and what it really means to love someone unconditionally, this debut novel will capture your heart.

     Abilene, 1871. Fifteen-year-old Will Merritt is fiercely protective of the cattle trade that made his father’s fortune. Idolizing the cowboys who flood the streets each summer, Will and his friends are drawn to Abilene’s exotic Texastown district—a powderkeg of saloons and brothels so notorious that the mayor has hired the West’s most famous gunman, Wild Bill Hickok, to police its streets. Yet even with Hickok as marshal, Abilene boils with deep divisions. The townsfolk resent the immigrant settlers whose new farms are slicing up the rangeland. And no one is more intolerant than Will’s best friend, Jasper, who delights in tormenting any farmer he encounters. But Will finds himself torn when he meets the beautiful and beguiling Anna, whose dignity and determination test his deepest beliefs. With the scaffolding of his life beginning to wobble, Will realizes that his flamboyant father, J.T. Merritt, has a secret, something hidden far out in the remote prairie. When J.T. makes his stunning secret public, everything Abilene believes about its future is challenged, and the Merritts become outcasts. And all the while, Will and the town are rushing toward an extraordinary tragedy involving Marshal Hickok. An event that will seal Will and Anna in a lifelong romance.- Winner of the Western Writers Of America 2013 Spur Award- Winner of the Western Fictioneers 2013 Peacemaker Award for Best Western First Novel- Winner of the 2012 Forward National Literature Award for historical fiction.- Winner of the 2013 Kansas Notable Book Award from the Center for the Book/State Library of Kansas

    Shy, quiet, and bookish, she’s glad when she lands a summer job as a nanny for the daughter of a local doctor. A respectable job, Mary Jane’s mother says. In a respectable house.The house may look respectable on the outside, but inside it’s a literal and figurative mess: clutter on every surface, IMPEACHMENT: Now More Than Ever bumper stickers on the doors, cereal and takeout for dinner. And even more troublesome (were Mary Jane’s mother to know, which she does not): The doctor is a psychiatrist who has cleared his summer for one important job—helping a famous rock star dry out. A week after Mary Jane starts, the rock star and his movie star wife move in.Over the course of the summer, Mary Jane introduces her new household to crisply ironed clothes and a family dinner schedule, and has a front-row seat to a liberal world of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll (not to mention group therapy). Caught between the lifestyle she’s always known and the future she’s only just realized is possible, Mary Jane will arrive at September with a new idea about what she wants out of life, and what kind of person she’s going to be.

    Except now he cannot escape the war that follows every step of the way as he and Henry—his comrade in arms—seek rest and recuperation in the mountains.Instead of wine and women, they find Germans and a secret plot to destroy France’s hub of munitions production. Cut off and outnumbered, they recruit a motley army comprising a women’s auxiliary and an old farmer with a big rifle and bad attitude.There’ll be no rest for these soldiers, not until Michel and Henry go to war.

    Born deformed yet mentally keen with a frighteningly sharp wit, strong intellect, and a voracious appetite for books, Ivan is forced to interact with the world through the vivid prism of his mind. For the most part, every day is exactly the same for Ivan, which is why he turns everything into a game, manipulating people and events around him for his own amusement. That is, until a new resident named Polina arrives at the hospital. At first Ivan resents Polina. She steals his books. She challenges his routine. The nurses like her. She is exquisite. But soon he cannot help being drawn to her and the two forge a romance that is tenuous and beautiful and everything they never dared dream of. Before, he survived by being utterly detached from things and people. Now Ivan wants something more: Ivan wants Polina to live.

    Living under occupation, the inhabitants of the village harbour a constant fear of losing their homes, jobs, belongings – and each other. On Ahmed’s twelfth birthday, that fear becomes a reality. With his father now imprisoned, his family’s home and possessions confiscated and his siblings quickly succumbing to hatred in the face of conflict, Ahmed embarks on a journey to liberate his loved ones from their hardship, using his prodigious intellect. In so doing, he begins to reclaim a love for others that had been lost over the course of a childhood rife with violence, and discovers new hope for the future.

    . .The New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Came Home sets her unforgettable new novel in China during WWII, inspired by true events surrounding the Japanese Army’s internment of teachers and children from a British-run missionary school.China, December 1941. Having left an unhappy life in England for a teaching post at a missionary school in northern China, Elspeth Kent is now anxious to return home to help the war effort. But as she prepares to leave China, a terrible twist of fate determines a different path for Elspeth, and those in her charge.Ten-year-old Nancy Plummer has always felt safe at Chefoo School, protected by her British status. But when Japan declares war on Britain and America, Japanese forces take control of the school and the security and comforts Nancy and her friends are used to are replaced by privation, uncertainty and fear. Now the enemy, and separated from their parents, the children look to their teachers – to Miss Kent and her new Girl Guide patrol especially – to provide a sense of unity and safety.Faced with the relentless challenges of oppression, the school community must rely on their courage, faith and friendships as they pray for liberation – but worse is to come when they are sent to a distant internment camp where even greater uncertainty and danger await . . .Inspired by true events, When We Were Young and Brave is an unforgettable novel about impossible choices and unimaginable hardship, and the life-changing bonds formed between a young girl and her teacher in a remote corner of a terrible war.

    They could not change it. In the remnants of a lost empire, the hordes of the Serpent, a newborn god thirsting for blood, are gathering to invade the realm with their dark magic.His family dead in a night attack, Codrin loses everything: his home, his standing, and his future. As the Serpentists chase him, the assassin-trained fighter has only one trusted ally – Shadow, his sentient sword. When he takes the Oath of Justice at his family’s graveside, he is struck by a bolt of silent lightning. His mother was a powerful Wanderer, and that strike awakens the magic of the White Light in him. Ancient knowledge and glimpses of a dark future come to him, but he doesn’t yet know that the fate of the realm rests in his hands.Lady Jara’s future hangs in a precarious balance; powerful men covet her land and covet her, after she loses her husband in battle. She is forced to retreat to Severin, with her daughters, for a last stand. A chance encounter with Jara draws Codrin to her new home. Two strong armies are marching toward Severin, and the city is doomed to fall … unless he can save it. Errant is by turns taut medieval fantasy and touching love story, an irresistible read. Enter a fantasy world of magic and gods, epic battles, intrigue and mystery.

    Indian mythology is replete with tales of Dévas battling the Asuras constantly. The interesting thing to note is that whether it is a God or an incarnation of a deity in human form, aka an Avatār, there was also a human element involved in these stories. The teachers of the Dévas (gods) and the Asuras were human sages, known as Rishis.    Find out what happens when seemingly unconnected individuals get drawn into a world of suspense and action, as mythology collides with their world in the book 'The Mahāsiddha Field', the first in a new sci-fi/fantasy series!   An elderly wandering mendicant in South India, two young Indian-American men, two soldiers from the Indian Army and a mysterious sage from high up in the Himalayas are thrown together in an adventure unlike any other; as a most unlikely adversary leaps out of the world of Indian Mythology to challenge their beliefs, their sanity and their courage.