Ever since Gabriela can remember, she and Luna have struggled to connect. But when tragedy strikes, Gabriela senses there's more to her mother than painted nails and lips.Desperate to understand their relationship, Gabriela pieces together the stories of her family's previous generations—from Great-Grandmother Mercada the renowned healer, to Grandma Rosa who cleaned houses for the English, to Luna who had the nicest legs in Jerusalem. But as she uncovers shocking secrets, forbidden romances, and the family curse that links the women together, Gabriela must face a past and present far more complex than she ever imagined.Set against the Golden Age of Hollywood, the dark days of World War II, and the swingin' '70s, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem follows generations of unforgettable women as they forge their own paths through times of dramatic change. With great humor and heart, Sarit Yishai-Levi has given us a powerful story of love and forgiveness—and the unexpected and enchanting places we find each.

    Outpost - A prelude to Blood on the Snow with Jack Hallam. The Emerald Graves - Lorn Mullone at the Battle of Vinegar Hill. Pipe and Drum - A tale of the Battle of Assaye seen through the eyes of a Highlander of the 78th Foot. Plains Wolf - Rifleman Arthur Cadoc impresses a certain Spanish Guerrillero. Summer is Coming - There is nothing more horrific than the horrors of the French retreat in icy Russia, 1812. The Diabolical Circumstance of Captain Bartholomew Chivers - A funny story in the vein of Harry Flashman. Flowers of Toulouse - A chilling story. Lamentation - A redcoat looks back on his life after the Battle of New Orleans. Enemy at the Gates - The bloody defence of Hougoumont. The Bravest of the Brave - Ney's final moments at Waterloo.

    Enlivened by Francesca Marciano’s wit, clear eye, and stunning evocations of people and places, The Other Language is an enthralling tour de force rich with many pleasures.

    From the story about a beautiful young woman who shows up thirsty in the bathtub of the Frangipani Hotel in Saigon many years after her first sighting there, to a young woman in Houston who befriends an old Vietnamese man she discovers naked behind a dumpster, to a truck driver asked to drive a young man with an unnamed ailment home to die, to the story of two American sisters sent to Vietnam to visit their elderly grandmother who is not what she appears to be, these stories blend the old world with the new while providing a new angle of insight into the after-effects of the war on a generation of displaced Vietnamese immigrants as well as those who remained in Vietnam.

    Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things: she lives in the very New York apartment in which she was raised, and sends Henry to the school she herself once attended. Dismayed by the ways in which women delude themselves, Grace is also the author of a book You Should Have Known, in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them. But weeks before the book is published a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongoing chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster, and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself. For readers of the best women's fiction. This is a free preview, not the full book.

    No journalist, reporter or talk show host had been granted the privilege to interview the 86-year-old recluse throughout her 21-book career. Julia's intrigue as to why she's the chosen one sends her packing and on a plane headed South in a hurry. Nestled among a canopy of banyan trees and palms, beneath the roof of Mrs. Van Buren's gingerbread island cottage, Julia finds one last unpublished manuscript. As the fragile old woman reads aloud to Julia from delicate pages that take us back to 1930s Macon, Georgia, and on up the road to Atlanta during days of the "Gone with the Wind" premier, secrets that have been held captive for over half a century surface that connect these women in more ways than either of them ever imagined.

    Searching these sinister stacks you will find:A church picnic at a haunted reservoir where only a twelve year-old boy is aware that something waits in the water…A burnt-out teacher that finds a friend… in his cancer…The secret to surviving the zombie apocalypse…An inoculation for Lycanthropy which may be more horrible than the disease…Young lovers that, on the eve of World War II, partake of a most forbidden fruit…A haunted carnival ride which delivers its passengers into the unexpected…21 tales of night terror, night madness, nightmares, night woe and night wonder…Welcome to The Night LibraryBe warned: The late fees are killer!

    A woman grapples with survivor’s guilt after a body is found in her garden bed; an ageing beauty queen contemplates her past; a world champion free-diver disappears during routine training...In moments disquieting or quietly inspiring, this collection considers the complexity of the connections we make—with our family, friends and neighbours, and with those met briefly or never at all.In her timely debut, Emily Paull voices a chorus of characters that reveal and re-evaluate the expectations of women in Australia today—after all, well-behaved women rarely make history.

    Chiusano’s dazzling stories delve into family, boyhood, sports, drugs, love, and all the weird quirks of growing up in a tight-knit community on the edge of the city. In the tradition of Junot Díaz’s Drown, Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago, and Russell Banks’s Trailerpark, this is a poignant and piercing collection—announcing the arrival of a distinct new voice in American fiction.

    To the rest of the world, she's a gifted graphic designer, marvelous cook, and doting Minneapolis mother. But then her world is shattered when her teenage daughter is murdered. Has her life of lies caught up with her? Detectives are asking dangerous questions and going after the wrong man. It's up to Sofia to find her daughter's murderer before her elaborate deception is exposed and she loses whatever semblance of a life she has left.Grab it now to see what is keeping early readers up all night!

    For two decades, she grieves the loss of Chase and struggles with her marriage to her husband, Alan. Meanwhile, Lydia Feller mourns the death of her estranged sister, who spent years living on the streets with mental illness and substance abuse. Lydia adopts the boy that she believes was her sister's son and raises him in a happy, stable home with her husband, Daniel, and their four children.God works in miraculous ways as, twenty years later, both women's worlds collide . . .

    Here sisters Ada, Vivie, and Bec assemble at their beloved family cottage, with children in tow and weekend-only husbands who arrive each Friday in time for the Sabbath meal.During the weekdays, freedom reigns. Ada, the family beauty, relaxes and grows more playful, unimpeded by her rule-driven, religious husband. Vivie, once terribly wronged by her sister, is now the family diplomat and an increasingly inventive chef. Unmarried Bec finds herself forced to choose between the family-centric life she's always known and a passion-filled life with the married man with whom she's had a secret years-long affair.But when a terrible accident occurs on the sisters' watch, a summer of hope and self-discovery transforms into a lifetime of atonement and loss for members of this close-knit clan. Seen through the eyes of Molly, who was twelve years old when she witnessed the accident, this is the story of a tragedy and its aftermath, of expanding lives painfully collapsed. Can Molly, decades after the event, draw from her aunt Bec's hard-won wisdom and free herself from the burden that destroyed so many others?Elizabeth Poliner is a masterful storyteller, a brilliant observer of human nature, and in As Close to Us as Breathing she has created an unforgettable meditation on grief, guilt, and the boundaries of identity and love.

    Six short tales of chilling suspense from bestselling author Sophie Hannah, plus an exclusive extract from her psychological thriller, THE CARRIER, published in February 2013.An ebook original from the queen of pyschological suspense, these short stories take ordinary domestic situations and peel back the lid to view the dysfunctional churning beneath...

    Some move toward the future heartened by what they learn from those around them--a tattoo artist, an invented medicine man, zoo animals, strangers, fellow outsiders. Deftly rendered, these stories abound with oddness and grace.In “Tattooizm,” included in The Best American Short Stories 2006, a young woman struggles with a promise that her boyfriend is determined to make her keep. In the Nelson Algren Award–winning “Space,” a reluctantly undertaken errand forces a young man to finally confront the death of his mother. And in “The Medicine Man,” hailed by the Times (U.K.) as “perfectly pitched and perfectly written,” a man recounts his manic attachment to his sister.Moffett’s closely observed stories are candid and complex, funny and moving. The world of Permanent Visitors is an idiosyncratic and generous one, its inhabitants searching for constancy in a place crowded with contradiction.

    She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash.As her family, friends, and classmates, deep in grief, joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her unforgettable last essay for the Yale Daily News, “The Opposite of Loneliness,” went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits. She had struck a chord.Even though she was just twenty-two when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. The Opposite of Loneliness is an assem­blage of Marina’s essays and stories that, like The Last Lecture, articulates the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to make an impact on the world.