Chester Blue was originally written as a children's chapter book. However, since its launch it has become an inspirational story for all ages. What if when you most needed help, a blue bear appeared with a note from God One night, Miss Millie of Blossom, Ohio turns her face to the stars and asks God for help. The next day, a package arrives on her doorstep containing a blue teddy bear and a very special note. God will meet us where we are... Over the course of a year, this remarkable blue bear travels across the country, showing up just when he's needed most. During his journey, Chester Blue helps a young girl trying to impress her big sisters; helps a man who has lost his job; saves a sailor caught in a terrible storm; reunites two constantly fighting brothers suffering from a terrible case of sibling rivalry; watches a cowboy become a rodeo clown; and helps a father and daughter after divorce. Each chapter is short story demonstrating God's love for us in every situation. God is everywhere. His love can find us anywhere. Whether you are a child or an adult, God has a very important message for you, too... God Loves You. Chester Blue is an inspirational book for kids, adults, parents, families, in other words, everyone.

    She loved fizzy drinks, swear words, fish fingers and Catholic churches, but most of all she loved living in Brighton in Queenie Malone's Magnificent Paradise Hotel with its endearing and loving family of misfits - staff and guests alike.But Tilly's childhood was shattered when her mother sent her away from the only home she'd ever loved to boarding school with little explanation and no warning. Now, Tilda has grown into an independent woman still damaged by her mother's unaccountable cruelty. Wary of people, her only friend is her dog, Eli. But when her mother dies, Tilda goes back to Brighton and with the help of her beloved Queenie sets about unraveling the mystery of her exile from The Paradise Hotel and discovers that her mother was not the woman she thought she knew at all ... Mothers and daughters ... their story can be complicated ... it can also turn out to have a happy ending.

    Over the next four years, the two become inseparable. For him, she breaks her solitude; for her, he leaves his busy circles behind. But knowing Max means knowing his family: the wealthy Rippons, all generosity, social ease, and quiet repression. Theirs is a very different world from Kate’s own upbringing, and yet she finds herself quickly drawn into their gilded lives, and the secrets that lie beneath. Until one evening, at the Rippons home, just after graduation, her life is shattered apart in a bedroom while a party goes on downstairs. What Red Was is an incisive and mesmerizing novel about power, privilege, and consent--one that fearlessly explores the effects of trauma on the mind and body of a young woman, the tyrannies of memory, the sacrifices involved in staying silent, and the courage in speaking out. And when Kate does, it raises this urgent question: whose story is it now?

    A rich portrait of a family at a crossroads

    Seven days. One big secret. The author of The Coincidence of Coconut Cake unfolds a mother-daughter story told by three women whose time to reckon with a life-altering secret is running out.Gina Zoberski wants to make it through one day without her fastidious mother, Lorraine, cataloguing all her faults, and her sullen teenage daughter, May, snubbing her. Too bad there’s no chance of that. Her relentlessly sunny disposition annoys them both, no matter how hard she tries. Instead, Gina finds order and comfort in obsessive list-making and her work at Grilled G’s, the gourmet grilled cheese food truck built by her late husband.But when Lorraine suffers a sudden stroke, Gina stumbles upon a family secret Lorraine's kept hidden for forty years. In the face of her mother’s failing health and her daughter’s rebellion, this optimist might find that piecing together the truth is the push she needs to let go...

    Over Christmas, Will receives a visit from his only remaining child, his daughter Alicia, who broke off contact with him five years ago. Alicia informs Will that she’s getting married in the spring, and asks him to attend the wedding. Alicia’s wedding is an opportunity for Will to reconnect with his family and regain part of what he has lost. But Will struggles with his still-raw emotions over his role in his daughter Trixie’s suicide. Will tries to reach out to the few women in his life to find a date, and makes an unexpected connection with Dorothy Crawford, a writer who shows up at his door, seeking directions. Will develops feelings for Dorothy, but finds that she has secrets of her own. As the wedding nears, Will must find a way to put the pain and guilt he feels Trixie’s death behind him, weigh the pain he feels at Dorothy’s betrayal with his own need for forgiveness, and pull himself together for his daughter’s sake. RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY is a poignant, wrenching story about a father’s love, a daughter’s compassion, and the universal need for forgiveness and redemption.

    David Kreutzer just wants his wife's vision to stop failing before she goes blind. And then one day, their lives are changed forever when they suddenly find out that they have the ability to heal the sick with a single touch. With gifts so amazing, why does the mysterious stranger lurking in the shadows want to destroy them both, by whatever means necessary?

    Includes stunning illustrations by Christoph Niemann. "A novelist who writes in a universal language." --The New York TimesIn The Archer we meet Tetsuya, a man once famous for his prodigious gift with a bow and arrow but who has since retired from public life, and the boy who comes searching for him. The boy has many questions, and in answering them Tetsuya illustrates the way of the bow and the tenets of a meaningful life. Paulo Coelho's story suggests that living without a connection between action and soul cannot fulfill, that a life constricted by fear of rejection or failure is not a life worth living. Instead one must take risks, build courage, and embrace the unexpected journey fate has to offer.With the wisdom, generosity, simplicity, and grace that have made him an international best seller, Paulo Coelho provides the framework for a rewarding life: hard work, passion, purpose, thoughtfulness, the willingness to fail, and the urge to make a difference.

    She knew that her father, Gary, convicted decades ago of being a mole in the CIA, was the most important Chinese spy ever caught. But his diary - an astonishing chronicle of his journey from 1949 Shanghai to Okinawa to Langley, Virginia - reveals the pain and longing that his double life entailed. The trail leads Lilian to China, to her father's long-abandoned other family, whose existence she and her Irish American mother never suspected. As Lilian begins to fathom her father's dilemma - torn between loyalty to his motherland and the love he came to feel for his adopted country - she sees how his sense of duty distorted his life. But as she starts to understand that Gary, too, had been betrayed, she finds that it is up to her to prevent his tragedy from damaging yet another generation of her family.

    Jangmi, on the other hand, has had to fend for herself since childhood, most recently by smuggling goods across the border. Then there is Danny, a Chinese-American teenager of North Korean descent whose quirks and precocious intelligence have long marked him as an outcast in his California high school. These three disparate lives converge when each of them escapes to the region where China borders North Korea—Danny to visit his mother, who is working as a missionary there, after a humiliating incident keeps him out of school; Yongju to escape persecution after his father is killed at the hands of the Dear Leader himself; and Jangmi to protect her unborn child. As they struggle to survive in a place where danger seems to close in on all sides, in the form of government informants, husbands, thieves, abductors, and even missionaries, they come to form a kind of adoptive family. But will Yongju, Jangmi and Danny find their way to the better lives they risked everything for? Transporting the reader to one of the most little-known and threatening environments in the world, and exploring how humanity persists even in the most desperate circumstances, How I Became a North Korean is a brilliant and essential first novel by one of our most promising writers.

    First among them is Wilhelmina—Billy—Gertz, as small as a child, fiercely independent, powerfully committed to her work as a playwright. The story itself centers on The Lake Shore Limited—a play Billy has written about an imagined terrorist bombing of that train as it pulls into Union Station in Chicago, and about a man waiting to hear the fate of his estranged wife, who is traveling on it. Billy had waited in just such a way on 9/11 to hear whether her lover, Gus, was on one of the planes used in the attack.The novel moves from the snow-filled woods of Vermont to the rainy brick sidewalks of Boston as the lives of the other characters intersect and interweave with Billy’s: Leslie, Gus’s sister, still driven by grief years after her brother’s death; Rafe, the actor who rises to greatness in a performance inspired by a night of incandescent lovemaking; and Sam, a man irresistibly drawn to Billy after he sees the play that so clearly displays the terrible conflicts and ambivalence of her situation.How Billy has come to create the play out of these emotions, how it is then created anew on the stage, how the performance itself touches and changes the other characters’ lives—these form the thread that binds them all together and drives the novel compulsively forward.A powerful love story; a mesmerizing tale of entanglements, connections, and inconsolable losses; a marvelous reflection on the meaning of grace and the uses of sorrow, in life and in art: The Lake Shore Limited is Sue Miller at her dazzling best.

    After a public split from her NFL superstar husband, Chelsea takes a bold step out of the limelight and behind the counter of the Higher Grounds Caf�, an old-fashioned coffee shop in dire need of reinvention. But when her courage, expert planning, and out-of-this-world cupcakes fail to pay the bills, this newly single mom finds herself desperate for help. Better yet, a miracle.Then a curious stranger lands on Chelsea's doorstep, and with him, an even more curious string of events. Soon, customers are flocking to the Higher Grounds Caf�, and not just for the cupcakes and cappuccino. They've come for the internet connection to the divine. Now the caf� has become the go-to place for people in search of answers to life's biggest questions.When a catastrophe strikes and her ex comes calling, Chelsea begins to wonder if the whole universe is conspiring against her quest to make it on her own. After a shocking discovery opens her eyes to the unseen world around her, Chelsea finds the courage to ask God a question of her own--and heaven answers in a most unexpected way."Max Lucado's remarkable gift of storytelling brings the pages to life in his novel Miracle at the Higher Grounds Caf�. This highly relatable story of working through heartache and standing firm on your faith is intertwined with a good dose of humor and overflowing with biblical truth. This message will stay with you long after you've read the last page." --Lysa TerKeurst, New York Times bestselling author of The Best Yes and It's Not Supposed to Be This Way"Step inside the Higher Grounds Caf�, a place brimming with whop, a heaping helping of comfort food, and a direct line to heaven. Where faith lives, all things are possible, for a family, a community, and one woman who wasn't sure she had the courage to believe again." --Lisa Wingate, New York Times bestselling author of Before We Were Yours "Now, here is the in-depth breakdown on why YOU will love it: First of all, Max Lucado is the best. Of course, angels, miracles and neighborhood caf�s are also at the top of the list. Most of us love stories and according to statistics, 54% of us actually love coffee. So, there! Read Miracle at the Higher Grounds Caf� immediately. It's a story by Max Lucado about an angel and the miracle performed for some folks (who drink coffee) in a cool neighborhood caf�. Can a book even get any better than this? I don't think so." --Andy Andrews, New York Times bestselling author of The Noticer and The Traveler's GiftFull-length inspirational novelUSA TODAY bestsellerIncludes discussion questions for book clubs

    A sweeping work of historical fiction, it shimmers between past and present as it tells the story of the rise and fall of a prodigious film studio and one man’s doomed obsession with all that passes in front of the viewfinder.For nearly half a century, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films, who started out as a concession agent for the Lumière brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days foraging mushrooms in the hills of Los Angeles and taking photographs of runaways and the striplings along Sunset Boulevard. But when a film-history student comes to interview Claude about The Electric Hotel—the lost masterpiece that bankrupted him and ended the career of his muse, Sabine Montrose—the past comes surging back. In his run-down hotel suite, the ravages of the past are waiting to be excavated: celluloid fragments and reels in desperate need of restoration, and Claude’s memories of the woman who inspired and beguiled him.

    Ripley and the intellectual and philosophical intrigue of John Banville's The Book of Evidence.A shy, bookish scholarship student from a working-class family, Owen Whiting has high hopes of what awaits him at Oxford, only to find himself adrift and out of place among the university's dim aristocrats and posh radicals. But his life takes a dramatic turn when he is assigned to the same philosophy tutorial as Zachary Foedern, a visiting student from New York City. Rich, brilliant, and charismatic, Zach takes Owen under his wing, introducing him to a world of experiences Owen has only ever read about. From the quadrangles of Oxford to the seedy underbelly of Berlin, they practice what Zach preaches, daring each other to transgress the boundaries of convention and morality, until Zach proposes the greatest transgression of all: a suicide pact. But when Zach's plans go horribly awry, Owen is left to pick up the pieces in the sleek lofts and dingy dives of lower Manhattan. Now he must navigate the treacherous boundary between illusion and reality if he wants to understand his friend and preserve a hold on his once bright future.

    Aiden’s best friend J.C. feels great remorse over his inability to save him, but J.C.’s grief is also seasoned with the guilt of loving Maddie through the years. Meanwhile, across the country another young man wakes up in a hospital and finds that his memories have been wiped clean, and replaced with haunting dreams of a beautiful woman and a five year old boy whom he feels driven to find. What Nicholas Sullivan discovers upon his journey is utterly unexpected—and it will change all of their lives, especially Maddie’s.