Her two daughters, from a previous relationship, are now both adult. Jo, ambitious and independent, is pursuing a career as a barrister. Jo’s younger sister is very different. Shelley, just 20, sweet natured, trusting and innocent, still lives at home and works at a local animal clinic. They are a normal, happy family - and then Shelley meets Sam on the street and everything changes. Martha struggles to accept Shelley’s choice of boyfriend as, with increasing anger, she witnesses the erosion of all Shelley’s values under Sam’s influence. When Martha’s efforts to persuade Shelley to give Sam up fail, she decides on a more direct approach. The consequences of her actions are devastating for everyone and change the course of Martha’s life forever. “After I’d gone up to bed that night, leaving Gabe amidst the carnage I had created in the living room, I formulated my plan. But it was pure chance that I met Sam on Putney Bridge some three weeks later and I went ahead with it.”

    The voices belong to the things in his house--a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous.At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world, where "things happen." He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many.And he meets his very own Book--a talking thing--who narrates Benny's life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter.With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz, to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki--bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane and heartbreaking.

    He thinks Mount Sinai Hospital is an exclusive golf course and his catheter is a gym bag. His only link to reality is his thirty-five-year-old nephew, who makes his living as a hired gun for thirteen softball teams and still goes by the name College Boy.But College Boy's body has begun to betray him -- almost as much as his lack of ambition. (His only legitimate paycheck comes from a gig as a laugher on a morning radio show.) Not only that, the Dirt King, a small-time gangster who controls all the replacement soil in Central Park, is after College Boy. As their lives collide, College Boy takes refuge in the arms of Sheila -- his uncle's cleaning woman and a part-time call girl.And then it gets weird.

    This engrossing story begins, "The city turned its dreariest aspect toward the railway on blackened walls, irregular and ill-paved streets, gloomy warehouses, and over all a gray, smoke-laden atmosphere which gave it mystery and often beauty. Sometimes the softened towers of the great steel bridges rose above the river mist like fairy towers suspended between Heaven and earth. And again the sun tipped the surrounding hills with gold, while the city lay buried in its smoke shroud, and white ghosts of river boats moved spectrally along.

    Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

    Michener, whose novels hurtle from the far reaches of history to the dark corners of the world, paints an intoxicating portrait of a land whose past and present are as turbulent, fascinating, and colorful as any other on Earth. When an American journalist travels to report on the upcoming duel between two great matadors, he is ultimately swept up in the dramatic story of his own Mexican ancestry—from the brilliance and brutality of the ancients, to the iron fist of the invading Spaniards, to modern Mexico, fighting through dust and bloodshed to build a nation upon the ashes of revolution. Architectural splendors, frenzied bullfights, horrific human sacrifice: Michener weaves them all into an epic human story that ranks with the best of his beloved bestselling novels.

    A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

    Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years - across oceans, deserts, and mountains - but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch. Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it, and soon our narrator - the girl, grown into a young mother - must flee her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future. A beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history, No One Is Here Except All Of Us explores how we use storytelling to survive and shape our own truths. It marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.

    The story revolves around a disparate group of people who come together there to establish an arts festival. There is Jack Curtis a self-made millionaire who has bought and refurbished the local stately home, Florence Plover, a garden designer in her sixties whom he has employed and her Anglo-Greek niece, Persephone. There are the Musgrove siblings, Thomas and Mary, whose family originally owned Melton Hall, who run a failing garden nursery nearby and there is Francis Brock, whose sister Celia, Thomas's wife, was tragically killed in a car crash some years previously.This is the story of their intertwining relationships and how they come to love, and not to love each other in different ways and why - a perfect book to curl up and read by the fireside on an autumn afternoon and as satisfying a read as "Brief Encounter" is a film.

    From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in.

    At the same time the man who murdered his father is being paroled after fifteen years in prison which stirs up long dormant feelings and causes Tom to ask what is justice, what is punishment, and what is revenge?Ten Percent of the Author's profits go to the Ranger Lead the Way Fund, a non-profit that supports disabled U.S. Army Rangers and the families of Rangers who have died, have been injured or are currently serving in harm's way around the world.

     Jazmin “Skylie G.” Gillette is a crafty middle schooler with big dreams and a wild imagination. She's searching high and low for the next big break for her singing group, The Divaz Five. Mission: Get a record deal. Dr. Billion "Dolla Billz" Norruson is a retired professional basketball player turned coach and video game scientist. He's searching high and low for basketball players to transform into slam-dunking superheroes. Mission: Save the world from sports-led destruction. When these two missions collide, the game of basketball and the world of sports and music will never be the same again. Go on a dunk-credible adventure with Jazmin, Briella, Janaya, Amani, and Takara, and discover how through a sudden twist of fate, they stumble upon the most unlikely opportunity—to become The Dunk’N Divaz—tween superheroines who fight crime and promote fairplay, one slam, one jam at a time...eventually. Confessions of a Tween Superheroine is J.M. Guy's first book in The Dunk'N Divaz series that's entertaining for kids of all ages, adults, and hoop lovers from around the world.

    I woke up early one morning, picked up my phone and started typing; my thumbs wouldn’t stop for three and a half hours. Then when they stopped, I completed this book where I will share with you my personal journey and understanding, where I successfully using the laws of attraction to create multi-million dollar business, set up a non-profit organisation that feeds an educates hundred of orphans out in Kenya and create and live the life of my dreams. I will also share with you how you can create the life of your dreams too,start living life on your terms through practical steps and applications of the law of attraction. “This is an absolute must-read if you want to use the law of attraction effectively, and learning it from someone who has actually successfully applied it. It is practical, concise, and straight to the point. Read it, learn it, set it, and forget it. You will see the magic unfold in your life.” Tim Han - Founder of Success Insider

    An occasional chambermaid, granddaughter to a typesetter, and daughter to a dead man, awkward and brave, wayward and willful, she is in love (unrequited) with an Iraq War veteran thirteen years her senior. She is convinced that she is a mermaid. What she does to ease the pain of growing up lands her in prison. What she does to get out is the stuff of legend. In the words of writer Michelle Tea, The Seas is "creepy and poetic, subversive and strangely funny, [and] a phenomenal piece of literature."

    until the bright light of Serendipity Wilson threw her into focus.Now an adult, haunted by an incident in which a child was lost from the circus, our narrator, a tightrope artiste, weaves together her spellbinding tales of circus legends, earthy magic and folklore, all in the hope of finding the child... But will her story be enough to bring the pair together again?Beautiful and intoxicating, A Girl Made of Air brings the circus to life in all of its grime and glory; Marina, Manu, Serendipity Wilson, Fausto, Big Gen and Mouse will live long in the hearts of readers. As will this story of loss and reconciliation, of storytelling and truth