Their friends – Jaws, Linda, and Mat Bond are all leading happy lives despite adjusting to the commitments of adulthood. Through ups dan downs, their friendship remained strong.But in life, love and happiness require hard work and sacrifice.For some, life will come to a beautiful full circle – proving that eternal happiness is for everyone, even if one was once, so far away from God.*** It is easy to give up on everything when one is drowning in hardships. But there are divine blessings in life, if one seek them with eyes of mercy and gratitude.

    To make up for that missed final conversation - and in the hopes of impressing beautiful nurse Sophie - he engages in some good-willed acts of deception- posing as the neglectful relatives of lonely old people in the Peggy Day Aged Cared Home. But when he meets Tamara, a frail and sick 76-year-old with a son she hasn't seen in twelve years, who will really be deceiving who? The Good Son is a story about people fulfilling each other's needs, sometimes unexpectedly. It is about love and fear and relationships, and how we treat the elderly people in our lives. And it is about the difference between blood relatives and the families that we make by choice rather than by birth. And, like all good stories, it involves a road trip.

    But when his son is taken away from him, he's left with nothing but the Memphis bar he manages. Then he hires Fay, a young white waitress, who has a volatile brother named Carl in tow. Nickel finds himself consumed with the idea of Taft -- Fay and Carl's dead father -- and begins to reconstruct the life of a man he never met. But his sympathies for these lost souls soon take him down a twisting path into the lives of strangers...

    Their task is to map a rail route through an uncharted wilderness.They overcome the many obstacles posed by nature-bears, bees, bats, river crossings, cliff falls, impossible weather-but can they survive the treachery of their competitors?This is a fast-paced and charming novel. Its children are brave and competent but not always right. Its world is magical enough to be intriguing but close enough to our own to keep the reader on firm ground.

    She must decide whether to shelter the girl and endanger herself and her mother, or to tread the route of safety in the face of corruption and brutality she had thought left far behind in the years of her childhood.A fast-paced and beautifully told story of three women and the real meaning of courage.

    They are not coping well. In response to their looming domestic breakdown, Vero and Shane get live-in help with their sons―a woman from the Philippines named Ligaya (which means happiness), whom the boys call LiLi. Vero justifies LiLi's role in their home by insisting that she is part of their family, and she goes to great lengths in order to ease her conscience. But differences persist; Vero grapples with her overextended role as a mother and struggles to keep her marriage passionate, while LiLi silently bears the burden of a secret she left behind at home.Between offers readers an intriguing, searing portrait of two women from two different cultures. At the same time, it satirizes contemporary love, marriage, and parenthood by exposing the sense of entitlement and superiority at the heart of upper-middle-class North American existence through a ubiquitous presence in it: the foreign nanny. Angie Abdou comically and tragically tackles the issue of international nannies by providing a window on motherhood where it is tangled up with class, career, labour, and desire

    Estranged from her parents, and living with her grandfather who is drowning in sadness, Oli faces the reality of life beyond university alone. When she wakes on a boat with no recollection of how she got there, she accepts the help of two strangers who change the course of her future forever. With Mac and Maggie, Oli learns to navigate a life upon open ocean and the world flowers into colours she's never seen before. Four years later, Oli, fluent in the language of the sea, is the only woman among men on a yacht delivery from Noumea to Auckland. In the darkness below deck, she learns that at sea, no one can hear you scream. Moving to London, Oli's life at sea is buried. When she meets Hugo, the wind changes, and her memories are dust blown into shapes. Reminding her of everything. Below Deck is about the moments that haunt us, the moments that fan out like ripples through the deep. So that everything else, becomes everything after.

    The distinctive old rock meetinghouse with its gabled slate roof, stained glass windows, and parquet-floored recreational hall had a personality of its own, and the many heartwarming, humorous, and life-changing activities that took place there helped shape Neal's perception of the world. But the overriding influence in those years was Neal's modest father, Harold Rogers, whose selfless sacrifices in behalf of his family, church, and country only later became fully evident to Neal.In a nostalgic description that calls to mind Norman Rockwell's famous illustrations, the author takes us back to a simpler time in American history and lovingly recalls an unassuming father whose greatness was demonstrated 'in small, simple, sturdy good deeds, repeated over and over again.'

    Youth and frailty, ambition and anxiety, the limitations of the body and the challenges of personal transformation: these are the undercurrents that animate acclaimed poet Ashleigh Young's first collection of essays. In Can You Tolerate This?—the title comes from the question chiropractors ask to test a patient's pain threshold—Young ushers us into her early years in the faraway yet familiar landscape of New Zealand: fantasizing about Paul McCartney, cheering on her older brother's fledging music career, and yearning for a larger and more creative life. As Young's perspective expands, a series of historical portraits—a boy who grew new bone wherever he was injured, an early French postman who built a stone fortress by hand, a generation of Japanese shut-ins—strike unexpected personal harmonies, as an unselfconscious childhood gives way to painful shyness in adolescence. As we watch Young fall in and out of love, undertake an intense yoga practice that masks an eating disorder, and gradually find herself through her writing, a highly particular psyche comes into view: curious, tender, and exacting in her observations of herself and the world around her. Can You Tolerate This? presents a vivid self-portrait of an introspective yet widely curious young woman, the colorful, isolated community in which she comes of age, and the uneasy tensions—between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation—that define our lives.

    How could Marnis parents bring someone like him to live with her normal family? And now its Marnis responsibility to babysit him. But soon Marni discovers there are some advantages to taking care of her older cousinand that someone unique is hidden beneath Sammys uncommon exterior. However, Marni still isnt looking forward to taking him to the first day of school. What will people think when they find out she is related to Sammy? What will they do? And, most importantly, what will she do? Destined to become a modern classic in LDS fiction, Sammys Song will open your eyesand your heart. Published: August 2005

    His fleeting fame as the drummer for a one-hit wonder rock band is nearly a decade behind him. His ex-wife is about to marry a terrific guy. And his Princeton-bound teenage daughter Casey has just confided in him that she’s pregnant—because Silver is the one she cares least about letting down.So when Silver learns that he requires emergency life-saving heart surgery, he makes the radical decision to refuse the operation, choosing instead to spend what time he has left to repair his relationship with Casey, become a better man, and live in the moment—even if that moment isn’t going to last very long. As his exasperated family looks on, Silver grapples with the ultimate question of whether or not his own life is worth saving.

    With writing that is both immediate and deeply steeped in its time, Anthony Quinn recreates wartime Liverpool.

    In 1930, the rag-tag riffraff of a railway stop called Las Vegas need a fighting man to shepherd their tiny church after their pastor is murdered. Might David Gold, a washed-up boxer and Bible-school dropout who fights as the Pummelin' Preacher, be the answer to their prayers?At the same time, Luke, a native Alaskan boy, is on a quest to find his father, who has abandoned his family for a beautiful woman his mother vows to kill. Little do mother or son imagine that their journey will take them to a small town in Nevada where demons and angels walk among men.In 2011,Science Cable T.V. producer Tim Faber is determined to prove that mankind has no need of God, while his lover, Joan Reed, strives to regain the faith of her youth. They're bound for Las Vegas to meet with 99-year-old Luke,who holds the key to a mystery they must solve--and answers that will forever change their lives.Hearts Set Free is a coming-of-age story and love story, with strong female characters and historical figures (including Jack Johnson, Georges Lemaitre, and Bugsy Siegel) who interact with an unforgettable fictional cast.

    He traces an intimate history of the Dunedin Sound—that distinctive jangly indie sound that emerged in the seventies, heavily influenced by punk—and the record label Flying Nun.As well as the pop culture of the seventies, eighties and nineties, Carter writes candidly of the bleak and violent aspects of Dunedin, the city where he grew up and would later return. His childhood was shaped by violence and addiction, as well as love and music. Alongside the fellow musicians, friends and family who appear so vividly here, this book is peopled by neighbours, kids at school, people on the street, and the other passing characters who have stayed on in his memory.We also learn of the other major force in Carter’s life: sport. Harness racing, wrestling, basketball and football have provided him with a similar solace, even escape, as music.Dead People I Have Known is a frank, moving, often incredibly funny autobiography; the story of making a life as a musician over the last forty years in New Zealand, and a work of art in its own right.

     Heading north for the holidays, things certainly hadn’t gone as she had planned. A snowstorm, an apple pie, and an old friend, all conspire to bring her to a crossroads. Will a Christmas Eve detour send her back to her snug village home, or will she forge ahead and let a turn in the road lead her to a newfound happiness? In this, the first entry in her new Rose and Briar Inn series, From Women’s Pens author Andrea Twombly weaves a warm story of the Christmas season, rich in challenges overcome and courage discovered along a twisting road to love. You won’t want to miss this one!