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A Parting Gift by Ben Erickson


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All the Water I've Seen Is Running


Elias Rodriques - 2021
    When the news of Aubrey’s death reaches Daniel in New York, years after they’d lost contact, he is left to grapple with the legacy of his precious and imperfect love for her. At ease now in his own queerness, he is nonetheless drawn back to the muggy haze of his Palm Coast upbringing, tinged by racism and poverty, to find out what happened to Aubrey. Along the way, he reconsiders his and his family’s history, both in Jamaica and in this place he once called home.Buoyed by his teenage track-team buddies—Twig, a long-distance runner; Desmond, a sprinter; Egypt, Des’s girlfriend; and Jess, a chef—Daniel begins a frantic search for meaning in Aubrey’s death, recklessly confronting the drunken country boy he believes may have killed her. Sensitive to the complexities of class, race, and sexuality both in the American South and in Jamaica, All the Water I’ve Seen Is Running is a novel of uncommon tenderness, grief, and joy. All the while, it evokes the beauty and threat of the place Daniel calls home—where the river meets the ocean.

Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome: Breaking the Ties That Bind


Amy J.L. Baker - 2007
    This book examines the impact of PAS on adults and offers strategies and hope for dealing with the long-term effects.

My Children Have Faces


Carol Campbell - 2013
    Now, with the Karoo veld so dry, Kapok, her man, insists on pointing their donkiekarretjie to Leeu Gamka, the one place Muis never wants to see again. Miskiet is waiting for her there and is going to make her pay for what she did. Little Witpop is excited. Town means she can watch television and maybe go to school, while her brother Fansie hopes there will be more food for him and their baby sister, Sponsie. Their return unleashes the devil and has them desperately fleeing. The police can t help if you don t have papers to prove that you were born. Vividly showing the invisible people of the Great Karoo, Carol Campbell s thrilling novel brings the nomadic karretjiemense to life."

While You Walked By


Regina Felty - 2020
    A FINALIST and highly recommended!’ The Wishing Shelf Book AwardsA young homeless boy. An old man who had lost everything. An unlikely friendship that brought healing to both.Ben doesn’t know what to think when a homeless boy shows up late one night behind Angelo’s Bakery where he works as a handyman. He’d seen his share of suffering humanity on the streets of Philadelphia, but there was something about this boy—so young, so vulnerable. Pushing sixty and feeling as if his life has no purpose, Ben struggles with his own problems. A recovering alcoholic, he is gripped with remorse over the loss of his wife and son, but determined to stay sober. Twelve-year-old Aden starts to run when an old man comes out of Angelo’s Bakery and catches him hiding, but something about the man draws Aden to him. Terrified and naive to life on the streets, Aden was forced to forge his own survival in the face of dangerous predators and violence after his mother abandoned him almost a year ago. Can Aden trust the gentle old man who offers him food and a hand of friendship? Will Ben be able to forgive himself and look for his son? While You Walked By delivers a heartfelt, coming-of-age story about the hope that can be found even in the most desperate circumstances.

The Language of Good-bye


Maribeth Fischer - 2001
     For Annie and Will, who have left their marriages to be together, the future is fraught with the complications of starting over. Both have left pieces of themselves behind: For Annie, it is the husband and friend she has known since childhood; for Will, it is the five-year-old daughter he adores. And for the Korean-born Sungae, one of Annie's English-as-a-second-language students, it is a search for the words that will help her resolve the sorrows of her tragic history. As Sungae struggles with the new language and with her memories, her story unfolds in ways that will have profound consequences not only for Sungae, but for Annie, Will, and their former spouses. A lyrical and deeply moving novel about love, loss, and language-and about confronting life's tough choices-The Language of Good-bye "weaves a wonderful story [about] letting go of the past and moving forward into the future" (Gail Tsukiyama, author of The Language of Threads).

The Road Most Traveled


Chuck Ragan - 2012
    There couldn't be a better person to put together this tome than Hot Water Music's Chuck Ragan and here he's collected tales from members of the Gaslight Anthem, Rise Against, At The Drive-In and more, all of whom share their own unique perspective on travel. The road isn't always glamorous but for some of us it's in our blood. These are those stories.

The Horse Whisperer


Nicholas Evans - 1995
    In a few terrible seconds the life of a family is shattered. And a mother's quest beings - to save her maimed daughter and a horse driven mad by pain. It is an odyssey that will bring her to...THE HORSE WHISPERERHe is the stuff of legend. His voice can calm wild horses and his touch heal broken spirits. For secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubled ears, such men were once called Whisperers. Now Tom Booker, the inheritor of this ancient gift, is to meet his greatest challenge.Annie Graves has traveled across a continent with her daughter, Grace, and their wounded horse, Pilgrim, to the Booker ranch in Montana. Annie has risked everything - her career, her marriage, her comfortable life - in her desperate belief that the Whisperer can help them. The accident has turned Pilgrim savage. He is now so demented and dangerous that everyone says he should be destroyed. But Annie won't give up on him. For she feels his fate is inextricably entwined with that of he daughter, who has retreated into a heartrending, hostile silence. Annie knows that if the horse dies, something in Grace will die too.In the weeks to come, under the massive sky of the Rocky Mountain Front, all their lives - including Tom Booker's - will be transformed forever in a way none could have foretold. At once an epic love story and a gripping adventure, The Horse Whisperer weaves an extraordinary tale of healing and redemption - a magnificent emotional journey that explores our ancient bonds with earth and sky and hearts untamed. It is a stirring elegy to the power of belief and self-discovery, to hopes lost and found again.

Animal Dreams


Barbara Kingsolver - 1990
    If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life." So says Loyd Peregrina, a handsome Apache trainman and latter-day philosopher. But when Codi Noline returns to her hometown, Loyd's advice is painfully out of her reach. Dreamless and at the end of her rope, Codi comes back to Grace, Arizona to confront her past and face her ailing, distant father. What she finds is a town threatened by a silent environmental catastrophe, some startling clues to her own identity, and a man whose view of the world could change the course of her life. Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native American legends, Animal Dreams is a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life's largest commitments. With this work, the acclaimed author of The Bean Trees and Homeland and Other Stories sustains her familiar voice while giving readers her most remarkable book yet.

Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery


Norman Mailer - 1995
    Here is Lee Harvey Oswald—his family background, troubled marriage, controversial journey to Russia, and return to an “America [waiting] for him like an angry relative whose eyes glare in the heat.” Based on KGB and FBI transcripts, government reports, letters and diaries, and Mailer’s own international research, this is an epic account of a man whose cunning, duplicity, and self-invention were both at home in and at odds with the country he forever altered.  Praise for Oswald’s Tale  “America’s largest mystery has found its greatest interpreter.”—The Washington Post Book World   “Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance. . . . From the American master conjurer of dark and swirling purpose, a moving reflection.”—Robert Stone, The New York Review of Books  “A narrative of tremendous energy and panache; the author at the top of his form.”—Christopher Hitchens, Financial Times  “The performance of an author relishing the force and reach of his own acuity.”—Martin Amis, The Sunday Times (London)   Praise for Norman Mailer  “[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.”—The New York Times   “A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”—The New Yorker   “Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”—The Washington Post   “A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”—Life   “Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”—The New York Review of Books   “The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”—Chicago Tribune   “Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”—The Cincinnati Post

Saved By the Music


Selene Castrovilla - 2009
    In Saved by the Music, Willow thinks she’s alone until she meets Axel, an older teen who lives isolated from the world on the sailboat docked nearby. An unlikely romance sparks as the two grapple with their darkest secrets and bond through shared pain and laughter. It is a summer where music must do more than just soothe the soul.

Legacy


James A. Michener - 1987
    Michener conjures the triumphs and tragedies of one family and their dynamic role in the history of the United States and its founding document. Over a tense weekend of reflection, Major Norman Starr of the National Security Council prepares to appear before a congressional committee to publicly account for his covert actions. Hoping to learn something from his proud, troubled heritage, Starr looks for guidance in the lives of his ancestors: all-Americans who weren't always right. From a framer of the Constitution to a slave owner, from a Supreme Court justice to a courageous suffragist, each recalls an important legacy that Starr must somehow reconcile with his own perilous dilemma. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James A. Michener's "Poland." Praise for "Legacy" " " "Michener has left his own legacy. . . . [He] is an educator, not just in history but in ethics, and like any good educator, he's not afraid to confront a complex world."--Edward Rutherfurd, "Chicago Tribune" "Michener tells interesting stories about the Constitution, even if they are fiction. He brings the document alive. . . . Each tale is told with the Michener flair."--United Press International "An impressive amount of historical drama . . . Captivating historical vignettes [are] woven skillfully within Starr's talks with his loving wife and loyal attorney."--"Kirkus Reviews" "A revealing book . . . about the forging of the Constitution and the crises that shaped it."--Associated Press

The Zygote Chronicles


Suzanne Finnamore - 2002
    The Zygote Chronicles is her singular take on the next leg of the journey -- a riotous and poignant novel in journal form that takes us from conception to delivery room. Through the voice of a whip-smart, sass-talking everywoman Zygote reveals the unsettling and uproarious truth about pregnancy and the prospect of motherhood. The Zygote Chronicles will resonate for any woman who has even briefly considered motherhood. The strange purgatory of pregnancy has been a fact of life since Eve ate the apple, but never has it been recounted in such brilliant, hilarious detail.

The Other Side of Everything


Lauren Doyle Owens - 2018
    When his neighbor is murdered, he emerges from his solitude to reconnect with his fellow octogenarians. These connections become a literal lifeline as a second, and then a third, elderly woman is murdered, and “the originals” as they call themselves, realize that they are being targeted. Amy Unger is an artist and cancer survivor whose emotional recovery has not been as successful as her physical one. After the woman next door is murdered, she begins to paint imagined scenes from the murder in an effort to cope with her own loss. But when her paintings prove to be too realistic, her neighbors grow suspicious, and she soon finds herself in the crosshairs of the police. And then there’s Maddie Lowe, a teenage waitress whose mother recently abandoned the family. As Maddie struggles to keep her family together and maintain the appearance of normal teenage life, she finds herself drawn to the man the police say is the killer. As they navigate their increasingly dangerous and tumultuous worlds, Bernard, Amy, and Maddie begin to uncover the connections between them, and the past and present, in a novel that ultimately proves the power of tragedy to spark renewal.

Beach Music


Pat Conroy - 1995
    His desperate desire to find peace after his wife’s suicide draws him into a painful, intimate search for the one haunting secret in his family’s past that can heal his anguished heart. Spanning three generations and two continents, from the contemporary ruins of the American South to the ancient ruins of Rome, from the unutterable horrors of the Holocaust to the lingering trauma of Vietnam, Beach Music sings with life’s pain and glory. It is a novel of lyric intensity and searing truth, another masterpiece among Pat Conroy’s legendary and beloved novels.

...And Ladies of the Club


Helen Hooven Santmyer - 1982
    A true classic, it is sure to enchant, enthrall, and intrigue readers for years to come.