Book picks similar to
Things to Come and Go by Bette Howland


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Boss Me


Hannah Ford - 2015
    But when she starts working for the sexy and mysterious Noah Cutler, Charlotte can’t help but dream about the gorgeous billionaire, even though she knows it’s just a fantasy. Men like Noah – gorgeous, dark, and driven-- usually aren’t interested in women like her. Noah Cutler is a man who doesn’t take no for an answer. His drive to go after exactly what he wants has made him one of the most powerful men in the city. And while he could have his pick of any woman, his sights are set on Charlotte. And he won’t stop until he’s taken control of every inch of her deliciously curvy body… HIS TWISTED GAME (BOOKS 1-4) One family with devastating secrets… Avery Buchanan has always hated her older stepbrother, Cole. With his piercing blue eyes and ripped body, Cole has gotten everything handed to him, floating through school and life effortlessly. One girl who will never forget… But when Cole leaves Avery and their dysfunctional family behind and heads to New York City to create Buchanan Enterprises, one of the most successful tech firms in the world, Avery vows never to forgive him. One man who won’t take no for an answer… After getting kicked out of the house by her mentally ill mother, Avery has no choice but to ask her stepbrother for help. Cole agrees to let her stay with him, under one condition – that she follow his rules, whatever they are, no questions asked. Cole is used to getting what he wants – and what he wants is Avery, no matter how wrong it is.... OBSESSED WITH HIM (BOOKS 1-3) Some promises are meant to be broken… Twenty-year-old Olivia Reilly has promised herself to one man and one man only – her best friend and soulmate, Declan Keene. And she’s kept that promise, through countless foster homes and moves across state. She’s never even kissed a boy – all because of a vow she made to Declan years ago. There’s only one problem. She doesn’t know where Declan is. Enter Colt Cannon. When Olivia starts working for the sexy and dangerous bad boy, she asks him to help her find Declan. Surely someone with Colt’s money and power will be able to track him down. Colt agrees, but he also demands something of Olivia in return. Something dark, sexual, and dangerous that will test her will and push her self-control to its limits...

One Hundred Open Houses


Consuelo Saah Baehr - 2010
    Pert, pithy and very New York. Full of the admirable offhand observations of an unfooled eye." Jill Neville, The London Times Literary Supplement"(Daughters is) engrossing . . . the story Baehr tells touches so deeply one is tempted to reread every page." - Chicago Tribune (Best Friends is) a pleasure to read . . . fascinating, extraordinary women…I wished they were my best friends.” Susan Isaacs, author of Compromising Positions, Shining Through“Consuelo Saah Baehr is a very talented writer. She keeps you turning the pages, heart thumping, to see what will happen next.” Rona Jaffe, author of The Best of Everything, Class ReunionProduct Description100 Open Houses is about real estate and life. It’s about the whispers from the soul hole that we barely hear. Rebecca Haas, like all of us, is being tortured to death by the sameness of her life, her thoughts, her weight, the incessant self review of life choices, her indecision, her stalled writing career. Can a change of space really change her life and finally give her the authenticity she needs? Take this trip with Rebecca through all of the open houses and the lives lived in them – is one of them yours?An excerpt from 100 Open HousesWhispers from the soul holeYou’re going along thinking everything is okay. You’re not noticeably dying or anything and even though your hair was thinning, suddenly for no reason, it stabilizes – even begins to get thicker – and you think, huh, some new kind of ‘fresh hell’ hormones must be kicking in but I’ll take it. Still every morning, in the quiet few minutes when you swing your legs out of bed and decide to get up, this voice whispers from the old brain hole or maybe it’s the soul hole and it says: Wait! If you were in an Ingmar Bergman movie and Death came and played chess with you, Death would win because you are not really living the best life you can.All through last fall and early winter I had that thought in my pocket. Maybe it accounted for a new addiction to read real estate news. Maybe I thought a change of residence would do the trick Real estate is the new drug and it’s better than crack because it only costs the price of the Sunday paper and not even that if you read it on line. But also, you can go into any Open House and see apartments and houses where you would never be invited. You can look in the medicine cabinet and in the closets and pretty much look at any damn thing you want. Then, you can say, “No thanks.”The New York Times just put out an entire magazine devoted to real estate. It’s called Key and on the cover is a stylized picture of a key with red lines radiating from it that look like the vein and capillary system inside your body. Maybe that’s the subliminal message they are trying to send: that Real Estate is the substance of your life.When I read Key magazine, I feel as if all the information has segregated me and shut me out. One of the articles tells you how much house one and a half million dollars can buy today. If you want to move to Szigetkoz, Hungary (no, I didn’t misspell it) you get a 30-acre, ten-bedroom castle. In New York City, you get a one-bedroom apartment with lava-stone kitchen countertops and the noise of the West Side Highway at your doorstep.That’s what I was going to have to do to save my life – move from my coveted idyllic village and find myself some Real Estate in New York City. I didn’t have a million dollars. I was going to have to really HUNT for a match like the innocent people in the New York Times they profile in The Hunt.

Hunters and Gatherers


Geoff Nicholson - 1991
    The narrator, Steve Geddes, is a writer doing a book on collectors, especially those with "unlikely, bizarre, or exceptionally useless collections." His research leads him to the Havergals, a wealthy, eccentric couple. They "collect people"; that is, she does the "collecting" while he watches-"a bout of troilism," as Geddes calls it. By accident, Geddes learns that reclusive "cult author" Thornton McCain may have written a book that Geddes hasn't heard of. Geddes the observer becomes both obsessed collector and, for the randy Havergals, object to be collected. An insightful delight from start to finish; recommended for all fiction collections.

Noble Norfleet


Reynolds Price - 2002
     A few days before Noble Norfleet's eighteenth birthday, his family suffers a violent catastrophe. The sole survivor, Noble throws himself into a reckless affair with his Spanish teacher, whose husband is fighting in Vietnam. When Noble graduates, he enlists as well and, while serving as an army medic, experiences a mysterious vision that seems tied to uncanny events in his recent past. Not until thirty years later -- after a life short on friends and troubled by a compulsion to worship women's bodies -- is Noble challenged to rethink the decades-old mystery of his family tragedy. Faced with an ominous choice, Noble finally comes to accept an enormous duty he's long tried to ignore. Soon, perhaps for the first time, his future seems hopeful.

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (And 7 Other Traditional British Mysteries): Boxed Set


Fergus Hume - 2017
    This collection includes 8 traditional British mystery novels: A COIN OF EDWARD VII THE SOLITARY FARM HAGAR OF THE PAWN-SHOP RED MONEY THE BISHOP'S SECRET THE GREEN MUMMY THE MYSTERY OF A HANSOM CAB THE MYSTERY QUEEN

Like Hell


Ben Weasel - 2001
    About a guy and his punk band. Who start out shitty, but persevere, and eventually become pretty popular. If I mentioned that Ben Foster is better known as Ben Weasel from Screeching Weasel, you'll get a much more nuanced idea about what this book is about, and certainly, what this novel MIGHT be based upon. Regardless, it's a great, rollicking read. Whether or not it's entirely true, or entirely false, anyone with any knowledge of 90s punk in America will recognise large chunks of this. And anyone with any interest in, appreciation of, or experience of being in a band, breaking up with a girl, or punk rock, will thoroughly enjoy. It's that good. Though why he had to kill off his guitarist and best friend at the end I'll leave to his shrink to fathom...

The Chirkuts


Alok Kumar
    A novel by Alok Kumar.

Go Tell it on the Mountain / Giovanni's Room / The Fire Next Time


James Baldwin - 1988
    

Three Minutes More


Edward R. O'Dell - 2010
    Severely injured, he does not know if he will survive the night. Reflecting on the evening's dreadful events, wondering if he could have done anything to alter them, his thoughts begin to drift. He begins to contemplate his remarkable life, his dysfunctional family, and the unfortunate prospect that he may have to soon answer for his life to God. While vividly recalling the most amusing, distressing, bizarre, and disturbing events of his life, he soon comes to realize "the monster you know is far easier to deal with than the monster you don't!" Will he get the miracle he needs to make it through the night? If so, will he finally find peace? Author's Note: This book deals with sensitive topics, and is intended for mature audiences only.

Slapstick/Mother Night


Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - 1976
    

The Bonfire of the Vanities, Part 1


Tom Wolfe - 1990
    This gargantuan helping of the human comedy relates how he is devoured by the masses of New York, a city boiling over with the itch to grab it now.

A Feeling Beyond Words


Abhishek Kothari - 2010
    Through this book of fiction, the author has made an attempt to answer several questions which we tend to place in front of others and which the world places in front of us. He has explicitly placed the phrases like "World says: Love can never be one sided, Where as some says: There is nothing called Love, But to the author: Love sees no side. It happens, to be the only Law of Life. And is the most Powerful thing one can possess". This romantic story whirls around a young boy who loved his dream girl in his thoughts and wanted to wait for her till his last breath. He was surrounded by many feelings but not the one that touched his heart and soul. He was heart broken and totally isolated. This was the moment when his lady love enters his life with with promises of eternity and endless love. His past experiences have made some unseen wounds on his heart and mind and before he could understand the selfless love of his Love, it was again too late. A beautiful piece encircled with love, hatred, frustration, depression and promises. This fiction book will let you know what love exactly is ? A truly romantic, heartwarming story for today's younger generation.

The Roaring Lambs: A Fable about Finding the Leader in You


Sreedhar Bevara - 2021
    

Naming the Spirits


Lawrence Thornton - 1995
    Wandering away into the night, with no memory, she can only utter the words, "I am". She ultimately arrives at the home of a couple whose only daughter has disappeared, setting in motion a tale of loss and redemption.

A Splendid Little War


Derek Robinson - 2012
    Not for long. By 1919, White Russians were fighting the Bolsheviks (Reds) for control of their country, and Winston Churchill (then Minister for War) wanted to see Communism 'strangled in its cradle'. So a volunteer R.A.F. squadron, flying Sopwith Camels and DH9 bombers, went there to duff up the Reds. 'There's a splendid little war going on,' a British staff officer told them. 'You'll like it.' Looked like fun. But the war was neither splendid nor little. It was big and it was brutal, a grim conflict of attrition, marked by cruelty, betrayal and corruption. Before it ended, the squadron wished that both sides would lose. If that was a joke, nobody was laughing. "A Splendid Little War" tests the pilots' gallows humour in a world of armoured trains and elegant barons, gruesome religious sects and anarchist guerrillas, unreliable allies and pitiless enemies. The comedy of this war, if it exists, is very bleak. Derek Robinson is at once our finest living comic novelist and a master of military fiction. Biggles was never like this.