Casey LePointe West is heiress to one of the greatest fortunes in America. Now, as Hurricane Katrina roars toward New Orleans, these two women are finding common ground in a city of ghosts and grandeur...Alexa as the FBI’s representative in a case guaranteed to destroy careers, and Casey as a woman whose husband has gone missing—and who herself may be the next victim of a brilliant manipulator’s rage. From the violent wards of an insane asylum to the primordial Louisiana swamps, Alexa is entering the darkest corners of a deadly mystery, peeling back layers of family secrets, hidden relationships, and a twenty-five-year-old crime. And as a raging hurricane gathers strength, she is plunged into a frantic race against time, in the eye of a storm of violence...and just where a ruthless killer wants her to be.

    Marah Morgan returns to Cowley County, Kansas, she is surprised to find herself agreeing to run the family farm for her injured and difficult father. When government agents arrive and begin searching the farm for an Indian burial ground, Marah grows suspicious. A mysterious stranger appears, looking for work. Then Marah discovers alarming details about her mother's death more than twenty-five years earlier, making her wonder if reconciliation with her father is possible, or if bitterness—and silence—will destroy them.

    It only needed a discarded chip on a South London street to lay him literally flat. So, bedbound and bored, Philip naturally starts to write the story of his life. But the mundane catalogue of seaside holidays and bodged DIY, broken relationships and unspoken truths, reveals more surprises, both comic and touching, than Philip or his family ever bargained for. Even, perhaps, a happy ending ...

    Jackson, Vivvie’s husband, was shot and killed 30 years ago, and the ramifications have splintered the family into their own isolated remembrances and recriminations.This deeply personal, hauntingly melancholy look at the damages families inflict on each other – and the healing that only they can provide – is filled with flinty, flawed and complex people stumbling towards some kind of peace. Like Elizabeth Strout and Kazuo Isiguro, Deborah Reed understands a story and its inhabitants reveal themselves in the subtleties: the space between the thoughts, the sigh behind the smile, and the unreliable lies people tell themselves that ultimately reveal the deepest truths.

    Tom Reasons thought that a money bet was enough for him. Then he put his career, his love, even his life on the line. Tom is just a year out of school, a paralegal in a Wall Street firm, and he's already asking himself, "Is this all there is?" He's not finding any thrills on the job, and off it he sees his friends sliding into marriages and careers. He also finds himself spending way too much time thinking about his ex-girlfriend, Lisa. Tom's pleasures are few and simple - chasing good times in bars with his old gang from school, leading his dart team. But his real escape is gambling. Every Friday night he bets his paycheck on a single game. If he wins, he lives the high life - checking out bands, standing his friends drinks, going after girls. If he loses, it's ramen noodles and TV until his next check. Win or lose, though, it's all worth it to Tom, because the thrill of risking it all is what reminds him he's alive. Tom's life works surprisingly well - until he crosses Joe Duggan. Duggan is the tough Irish captain of the meanest dart team in the league, an outfit from Hell's Kitchen known as the Hellions. After Tom's team has the nerve to beat the Hellions for the league championship, Duggan wants a rematch - this time for a little money. When a little money becomes a lot, Tom's scramble through the underworld of New York to raise the money brings him, his friends, and Lisa into dangerous territory. When it all comes down to one throw of a dart, with everything on the line, Tom discovers what he's really wanted, really needed, all along.

    Since an assignment in Cape Town ended in tragedy and regret, Nadine has not returned to South Africa, or opened her heart–until she hears the story of Jason Irving. Jason, an American student, was beaten to death by angry local youths at the height of the apartheid era. Years later, his mother is told that Jason’s killers have applied for amnesty. Jason’s parents pack their bags and fly from Nantucket to Cape Town. Filled with rage, Jason’s mother resolves to fight the murderers’ pleas for forgiveness.As Nadine follows the Irvings to beautiful, ghost-filled South Africa, she is flooded with memories of a time when the pull toward adventure and intrigue left her with a broken heart. Haunted by guilt and a sense of remorse, and hoping to lose herself in her coverage of the murder trial, Nadine grows closer to Jason’s mother as well as to the mother of one of Jason’s killers–with profound consequences. In a country both foreign and familiar, Nadine is forced to face long-buried demons, come to terms with the missing pieces of her own family past, and learn what it means to truly love and to forgive.With her dazzling prose and resonant themes, Amanda Eyre Ward has joined the ranks of such beloved American novelists as Anne Tyler and Ann Patchett. Gripping, darkly humorous, and luminous, Forgive Me is an unforgettable story of dreams and longing, betrayal and redemption.

    "He brings to life characters and situations as vivid and compelling as any in contemporary literature."--Michael Dorris, The Washington Post Book World.

    Seen through the eyes of young Linda Fallon and the young man who loves her.Anita Shreve, the bestselling author of The Pilot's Wife, returns with a dazzling new novel about love, forgiveness, and paths not followed. Linda Fallon encounters her former lover, Thomas Janes, at a literary festival where both have been invited to give readings from their work. It has been years since their paths crossed, and in that time Thomas has become a kind of literary legend. His renown is enhanced by his elusiveness; for most of the past decade, he has remained in seclusion following a devastating loss. This is no chance meeting. Thomas learned that Linda was reading at the festival and chose this moment to reestablish contact with a woman he passionately pursued years earlier. Their affair was disastrous, and a turning point in both their lives. Neither the intensity of their relationship nor the damage it did has ever been far from his memory. From the moment they speak, The Last Time They Met unfolds the story of Linda and Thomas in an extraordinary way: it travels back into their past, bypassing layers of memory and interpretation to present their earlier encounters with unshakable immediacy. In Africa, when Linda and Thomas were twenty-seven, and in Massachusetts, when they were in high school, the novel re-creates love at its exhilarating pinnacle - the kind of intense connection that becomes the true north against which all relationships are measured. Moving backward through time, The Last Time They Met traces the extraordinary resonance a single choice, even a single word, can have over the course of a lifetime. At the same time, the novel creates an almost unbearable mystery, a mystery that can only be understood fully in the novel's final pages, in the eyes of young Linda Fallon and the young man who loves her. With a master's control of phrase, observation, emotion, and character, Anita Shreve has written a beautiful and unforgettable exploration of intimacy, loss, and lifelong desire.

    Ditto Edward Kirkland, a charming playboy who has never known what it means to work for a living, and hopes never to find out. Enter Emily, who becomes Becca and Edward s common denominator when a quirk of fate gives them joint custody of the precocious little girl. Suddenly, two people who have never met find themselves sharing the trials and tribulations of domestic life as they navigate the rocky shoals of parenthood, from naptime to play dates to pre-school admissions. And amid the daily demands of raising a young child, Becca and Edward discover something else: They re made for each other."

    Scott Fitzgerald described (L.A. Weekly).

    Beginning their relationship when Sonny is just fourteen and Felicity thirty-four, the couple share a poignant history together that ends only upon Felicity's passing — despite four marriages, numerous obstacles, and enough misadventures to challenge the most loyal of lovers.At once heartbreaking and euphoric, their story mirrors the tale that Felicity has passed down to Sonny, a story uncanny in its similarity to their own: when a prehistoric outcast locates her former tribe, she falls in love with a young boy.A masterful novel first published a quarter of a century ago, The Crying Heart Tattoo keeps the impossible within reach, proving once and for all that the struggle for true love is worth everything.

     Aaliyah Johnson just wants to live a normal life – finish school, have a career, a family, a future. But when her father takes his own life after his return from the war in Afghanistan, she and her mother are plunged into poverty and a homeless struggle to survive. The unusual circumstances of her mother’s acquisition of a small, green suitcase seem to mark a turnaround in their luck as they begin to rebuild their lives. Then, in a heartbeat, a devastating blow rocks her world, and young Aaliyah’s baggage may be more than she can bear. Review The author tells a very powerful story filled with themes of racial and ethnic injustice and discrimination, class differences, the importance of relationships, and the impact of trauma on teens and families. I found myself looking forward to reading more from the very start. - OnlineBookClub.org official review

    Alas, she is more of the Jack Daniels kind. Self-medicating with ice cream for breakfast, breaking down at the supermarket, and showing up to work in her bathrobe and bunny slippers-soon she's not only lost her husband, but her job, house...and waistline. With humor and chutzpah Sophie leaves town, determined to reinvent her life. But starting over has its hurdles; soon she's involved with a thirteen-year-old who has a fascination with fire, and a handsome actor who inspires a range of feelings she can't cope with-yet.

    In her journey, she has two companions - Meera and her talking rational mind. Her idea of love and respect guides her to take some strong decisions. The feeling of being loved is the story of those rational decisions taken by a distracted mind to make things alright.

    Recently, Kessinger Publishing's rare reprints has re-issued the book. The protagonist, Roger Stetworth, unwillingly joins a slave ship called the -Golden Hind- captained by Luke Chilton. (When Chilton demanded that Roger -sign aboard- he refused and was clubbed on the head and thrown overboard.) He is rescued by the -Hurst Castle- and doctored by a painfully stereotyped Irishman. The -Hurst Castle- is abandoned but does not founder in a gale and the crew, unable to get to him, are forced to leave Stetworth marooned aboard. The ship drifts into the center of the Sargasso Sea where Stetworth finds himself in a ships' graveyard in which survivors of previous shipwrecks still inhabit the forgotten ships. Stetworth must rely on his own ingenuity to get free from the choking sargasso weeds........ Thomas Allibone Janvier (July 16, 1849 - June 18, 1913) was an American story-writer and historian, born in Philadelphia of Provencal descent. Early life and marriage: Janvier received a public school education, then worked in Philadelphia for newspapers from 1870-81. In 1878 he married Catherine Ann Drinker (May 1, 1841- July 19, 1922), an artist who was the first woman teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and first teacher to Cecilia Beaux. Later in life, she accompanied her husband on his travels while writing books and translating books from the Provencale language. Many of Janvier's published works would be dedicated -To C. A. J.- New York: Janvier went to New York in 1881. From 1884-94, he lived in the Washington Square district of New York. A few years after arriving, he published the Ivory Black Stories, tales of artist life, which were reprinted in book form in 1885 as Color Studies. In them he pictured the life and color of what was then considered the Latin quarter of the city, with the old-fashioned French restaurants, the artist colony to the north, and the studios in Tenth Street where Abbey, Millet, F. Hopkinson Smith, Laffan and others made the Tile Club famous. He published many stories and articles in Harper's Magazine.[2] Travels and death: Janvier spent several years in Colorado, New Mexico and Mexico, thereby gaining inspiration and material for much of his literary work. His travels in Mexico produced the Aztec Treasure House and his stories of Old New Spain. He and his wife also lived for three years in Avignon, Provence, France, where they became friends with Mistral and Felix Gras. Catherine A. Janvier's translations of the latter's work introduced him to English-speaking readers.His books from this period include An Embassy to Provence, Christmas Kalends of Provence and The South of France. He was made an honorary member of the Felibrige society in France, and of the Fol Lore Society of London, where he and his wife lived from 1897 to 1900, and the Century Club in New York. Janvier died in New York on June 18, 1913. He is interred in Moorestown, New Jersey. Literary family: Janvier's sister, Margaret Thomson Janvier (1844-1913), was born in New Orleans. Under the pen name Margaret Vandergrift she wrote many juveniles, among which are: The Absent-Minded Fairy, and Other Verses (1884); The Dead Doll, and Other Verses (1900); Under the Dog-Star (1900); and Umbrellas to Mend (1905). Janvier's niece, Emma P. Spicer, going by the stage name of Emma Janvier, was a well-known comedian on Broadway and elsewhere from the turn of the century until her death in the early 1920s. Janvier was also related to Philadelphia businessman and poet Francis De Haes Janvier.