His clothing, shoes, and watch were found abandoned near a freight line track in Central California. His jockey shorts and wallet were never found. The police have no clue, and Simon's wife had no warning that anything was wrong.Ella takes off on foot across much of California and Arizona, thinking she can find Simon using nothing but her knowledge of the way he might think. Her search leads her to the Navajo Nation in Arizona, where she is helped and befriended by three Native Americans and an aged paint horse named Yozzie.Ella has serious mental health issues, and Simon, who raised her, is still the most important person in her shaky world. Only maybe it's not as unstable as it looks from the outside. Maybe inside Ella, a core of unexpected strength is emerging. Maybe Ella is even stronger than the brother who held her family's lives together for so long.

    Cam, Josie's eldest, is her father's daughter - headstrong, smart, fearless, and utterly hopeless when it comes to making peace with either her family or herself. Years ago, she acquired the cynical veneer born of living too long in New York City and watching her writerly dreams fade. Still reeling from a breakup with the man she loves, she heads south heartily skeptical of the comforts of home and hearth. For Cam, this will be a season of shocks and surprises. Lila, the poised and perfect stay-at-home mother of two, lives near Josie in Hilton Head and is experiencing the slow disintegration of her own essentially loveless marriage. She dreads the prospect of this family reunion - especially the return of her black sheep, brilliant older sister, Cam. Yet, astonishing even herself, this is the Christmas when Lila finally will rebel. Evie, the all-too-candid baby of the family, routinely shares her family's secrets in her advice column for a Savannah newspaper. But even Evie has never created a scene like the tableau she stages at this Christmas dinner - when she arrives on the arm of her latest love, a rich man old enough to be her father....

    Orphaned while onboard ship from Ireland, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives on the steps of a tobacco plantation where she is to live and work with the slaves of the kitchen house. Under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate daughter, Lavinia becomes deeply bonded to her adopted family, though she is set apart from them by her white skin. Eventually, Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. Lavinia finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds. When she is forced to make a choice, loyalties are brought into question, dangerous truths are laid bare, and lives are put at risk.

    Together, these two young people work to form a family, though neither has any idea how to accomplish that, and the odds are against them in a place with little to offer other than tobacco fields, a bluegrass bar, and a Walmart full of beer and firearms for the hunting season. Their path is harrowing, but Lucy and Jeptha are characters to love, and readers will root for their success in a novel so riveting that no one will want to turn out the light until they know whether this family will survive.In luminous prose, debut novelist Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne brings us a present-day Appalachian story in the tradition of Lee Smith, Silas House, and Wiley Cash, cast without sentiment or cliché, but with a genuine and profound understanding of the place and its people.

    Now her unique flair for evocative settings and richly drawn Southern personalities shines in her compelling new novel, Looking for Me. Teddi Overman found her life’s passion for furniture in a broken-down chair left on the side of the road in rural Kentucky. She learns to turn other people’s castoffs into beautifully restored antiques, and eventually finds a way to open her own shop in Charleston. There, Teddi builds a life for herself as unexpected and quirky as the customers who visit her shop.  Though Teddi is surrounded by remarkable friends and finds love in the most surprising way, nothing can alleviate the haunting uncertainty she’s felt in the years since her brother Josh’s mysterious disappearance. When signs emerge that Josh might still be alive, Teddi is drawn home to Kentucky.  It’s a journey that could help her come to terms with her shattered family—and to find herself at last.  But first she must decide what to let go of and what to keep.Looking for Me brilliantly melds together themes of family, hope, loss, and a mature once-in-a-lifetime kind of love. The result is a tremendously moving story that is destined to make bestselling author Beth Hoffman a novelist to whom readers will return again and again as they have with Adriana Trigiani, Fannie Flagg, and Joshilyn Jackson.

    Nice Guy who's found companionship and comfort with Marsha.  The only problem is that he's become too comfortable.  Weighing seventy-five pounds more than when the courtship first began, the newly food-obsessed Sonny just can't stay away from Marsha's marvelous dishes, even in the middle of their breakup conversation.Determined to slim down and get his girlfriend back, Sonny joins the FutraSystem weight-loss center and meets potential love interest Kayla, as well as a host of other colorful characters. In a heartwarming tale that is alternately hilarious, wise, and ultimately self-affirming, Whitfield has created a thoroughly delicious and engaging novel sure to be enjoyed by those who have waged the battle of the bulge, or know someone who has.

    But their dreams are abruptly shattered by a brutal Indian raid upon the Johnsons' settlement while Britt is away establishing a business. Returning to find his friends and neighbors slain or captured, his eldest son dead, his beloved and severely damaged Mary enslaved, and his remaining children absorbed into an alien society that will never relinquish its hold on them, the heartsick freedman vows not to rest until his family is whole again. A soaring work of the imagination based on oral histories of the post-Civil War years in North Texas, Paulette Jiles's The Color of Lightning is at once an intimate look into the hearts and hopes of tragically flawed human beings and a courageous reexamination of a dark American history.

    Poured down so hard it washed the blood off my face.' Thus begins the story of ten-year-old Lori Jean, whose short life and early death are woven into a poignant, heart- wrenching novel set in the rural South of the 1950s.

    These days it's Rory who has to look after the old man, and both of them dread being split up. But when he's told his grandad needs to go into a home and that he will be fostered, Rory is galvanised into setting out on the run with Granda. But where are they going, and where can they hide when their faces are plastered all over the newspapers and TV?

    Filled with humor and pathos, with the nearness and danger of life on the edge, these stories chart the anxious inner moments of four related characters.Johnson introduces the teenage Delia in the midst of working up the nerve for a first kiss; and Dooley, who drives a forklift for a living but dreams of a career in music that's been put on ice after a tragic accident. Pudge, an alcoholic who survived a cruel childhood with an abusive father, now hides from his own son, Luis; and Luis, raised without a father, concocts a suitable end for his mother's horrible boyfriend. Determined to save both Pudge and his son from an unhappy end, Johnson's cast of characters huddles together at the local laundromat, scheming.Johnson's stories are sweet, messy, and heart-rending. As we watch her characters through her wide-angle lens, she makes us believe that life is worth living even when the circumstances say otherwise. Irresistible and perfect, More of This World or Maybe Another introduces an original voice in American fiction.

    Muir is an innocent, a shy young man with big dreams. Moody, the older and wilder brother-embittered by the death of his father, by years of fighting his mother, and by his jealousy of Muir's place in the family-takes to moonshine and gambling and turns his anger on his brother. Muir escapes by wandering, making his way around the country in attempts to find something-an occupation, a calling-to match his ambition.Through it all, their mother, Ginny, tries to steer her boys right, all the while remembering her own losses: her husband (whose touch still haunts her), her youth, and the fiery sense of God that once ordered her world.When Muir, in a drunken vision, decides that his purpose in life is to clear a space on a hill and build a stone church with his own hands, the consequences of his plan are far-reaching and irrevocable: a community threatens to tear itself apart, men die, and his family is forever changed. All that's left in the aftermath are the ghosts and the memories of a new man.

    An unlikely meeting with a cop and a skateboard sends his life in a completely new direction. He starts high school and, along with his group of misfit friends, soon becomes a contender on the Cincinnati skateboard scene. Along the way he quickly learns that life off the board isn’t so simple. The party life is snatching his friends away from their boards. He winds up stuck in an on-again and off-again love triangle. And he realizes that not fitting in just may be the death of him. YESTERDAY ERASED is a hard-to-put-down, 109,000-word commercial fiction piece, based on my own experiences growing up. It deals in themes any young adult, skateboarder or not, can relate to and leaves you pondering your life when you’re done. No matter who you are, you'll find a piece of yourself in this book! The author, Andy Schrock, spent most of his time growing up on a skateboard. He now makes a living creating content online as well as running his own skateboard company, ReVive Skateboards. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with his wife and their son.

    

    Now, six years later, his old friend, Sheriff Seth Bowlen, in Sisters, Colorado is in trouble and needs help. Sheriff Bowlen sends a wire to United States Marshal Billy French in Santa Fe who in turn sends Deputy Marshal Wade Garrison to help their old friend. Innocently, Wade decides to take his wife, Sarah, and son, Emmett, with him so they can visit her family in Harper, a small town northeast of Sisters. As he and his family board the train in Santa Fe, he could not have known that a terrible storm of violence was already brewing and this fateful decision could destroy his wife and child.

    At early stage he was unaware that he was in love with Siyaa but when their school ended and both of their paths were separated, he went into deep depression. As time passes Ayyan tries many times to get Siyaa back in his life, But what's going on in Siyaa's mind?