One is reliving the abandonment of his mother and the death of his little sister. The next has a grandmother suffering from Alzheimer's. The third is the daughter of constantly warring parents. Their worlds collide at the annual fair.

    It's about finding light in dark places, and it examines the cost of unconditional love.Mary McConnell grew up longing for information about the mother she never knew, who died suddenly when Mary was only a baby. Her brother Sean was barely old enough to remember, and their father numbed his pain with drink.Now aged thirty-five, Mary has lived in the same house her whole life. She's never left Belfast. She has a son, TJ, who's about to turn eighteen, and is itching to see more of the world.One Saturday morning, TJ wakes up to find his mother gone. He doesn't know where - or why - but he's the only one who can help find her.Mother Mother takes us down the challenging road of Mary's life, while following TJ's increasingly desperate search for his mother, as he begins to understand what has led her to this point.This is a gritty, affecting novel about family, grief, addiction, and motherhood. And it asks the question - if you spend your life giving everything to the ones you love; do you risk losing yourself along the way?

    40 pages of summaries and analysis on The Secret History by Donna Tartt. This comprehensive study guide includes the following sections written by BookRags.com: Plot Summary, Chapter Summaries & Analysis, Characters, Objects/Places, Themes, Style, and Topics for Discussion.

    Her fifteen year old son, Aiden, is missing. Jan draws together the threads of missing person cases spanning fifty years and finds tragic connections and unsolved questions.Bessy Swain, an elderly woman that Jan finds dead on her search for Aiden, and whose own son, Thomas, was also missing, may have the answers.Jan uses Bessy's information and her own skills and instinct to track down the missing boys. But is it too late for Aiden?Set in the North West of England, with the notorious Saddleworth Moor as a backdrop, Random Acts of Unkindness is a story about motherhood, love and loss and how families of missing people suffer the consequences of major crimes involving their loved ones.Random Acts of Unkindness is the first in the DS Jan Pearce series of novels.

    Hailed as "America's Alchemist," his proclamation that "debt is an asset" has propelled him to a dizzying level of success. By orchestrating the takeover of a massive steel manufacturer, Merkin intends to do the "deal of the decade," the one that will rewrite all the rules. Working on his broadest canvas to date, Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar chronicles the lives of men and women engaged in financial civil war: insatiable investors, threatened workers, killer lawyers, skeptical journalists, and ambitious federal prosecutors. Although it's set 40 years in the past, this is a play about the world we live in right now; a world in which money became the only thing of real value.

    She decides to pay her former cleaner, Mary Tendo, a surprise visit. But Mary, now the Executive Housekeeper of the Sheraton Hotel in Kampala, has secretly borrowed Vanessa's ex-husband Trevor, a plumber, and taken him to her home village to help build a well. Vanessa decides instead to take a trip into Bwindi Impenetrable Forest to see the mountain gorillas. But she manages to insult her driver so much that he leaves her in the lurch, and as war threatens Bwindi from the Congo side of the border, it's up to Trevor and Mary to come to her aid. A comedy of cultural errors.

    But the more Jean investigates, the more her life becomes strangely (and not unpleasantly) intertwined with that of the Tilburys: Gretchen is now a friend, and her quirky and charming daughter Margaret a sort of surrogate child. And Jean doesn't mean to fall in love with Gretchen's husband, Howard, but Howard surprises her with his dry wit, his intelligence and his kindness — and when she does fall, she falls hard.But he is married, and to her friend — who is also the subject of the story she is researching for the newspaper, a story that increasingly seems to be causing dark ripples across all their lives. And yet Jean cannot bring herself to discard the chance of finally having a taste of happiness...But there will be a price to pay, and it will be unbearable.

    Other kids are into punk or ska, but Una is learning to play "Mull of Kintyre" by Wings on the guitar, and she thinks it’s a really good song. There's another song, chanted on the terraces by Leeds United fans. It might not have made it on to Top of the Pops, but the boys all sing it on the walk home from school: "One Yorkshire Ripper . . . There’s only one Yorkshire Ripper . . . One Yorkshire Ri-pper . . ."  A serial murderer is at large in West Yorkshire and the police—despite spending more than two million man-hours hunting the killer and interviewing the man himself no less than nine times—are struggling to solve the case. As this national news story unfolds around her, Una finds herself on the receiving end of a series of violent acts for which she feels she is to blame. Unbecoming explores gender violence, blame, shame, and social responsibility. Through image and text Una asks what it means to grow up in a culture where male violence goes unpunished and unquestioned. With the benefit of hindsight Una explores her experience, wonders if anything has really changed and challenges a global culture that demands that the victims of violence pay its cost.

    Gun law is out of control. Organized gangs are fighting for supremacy in clubland and the lucrative supply of narcotics. Younger, more ruthless gangs are moving in. Ged, Moby and Ratter, three South End villains, are old-fashioned highwaymen with two decades of meticulously planned jobs behind them. But times are tough. It’s Christmas and Ged is planning a job to see the boys through until spring. As usual, he won’t give them any details until the morning of the job. Until then, they have to stay off the street and keep out of trouble.But Moby loves to go out – girls love him, guys send drinks over – he could live like this forever. And Ratter wants out – he’s invested his loot in the booming property sector. As the heist approaches, Ged needs to summon all his street savvy and killer instinct just to survive.

    The Globe and Mail describes THE MEMORY OF WATER as "both gloriously funny and deeply felt Indeed, THE MEMORY OF WATER is so funny that it appears at first to be pure black comedy, with the newly bereaved sisters indulging wildly in witty bickering and dope-induced dress-ups Their quarrels over the fu-neral arrangements, their well-worn family roles, their unsatisfactory men and their mixed memories of a highly feminine working-class mother are hilarious In THE MEMORY OF WATER, [Shelagh Stephenson] skillfully charts the joyous and painful territory of family relationships with insight and compassion."

    Unknown to Freya, these women, over centuries, fought with whatever weapons came to hand – deception, endurance, even murder – to preserve their home and family.Freya falls in love with the house, but her inheritance includes an enigmatic letter telling her to ‘restore the balance’ of the Lady’s Well. Besides this, the house seems to be haunted by the scent of flowers.In the past, the Lady’s Well was a place of healing, and Freya soon feels safe and at home, but she has demons of her own to conquer before she can accept the happiness that beckons.

    This special 2-for-1 collection features two of these classic titles: Riders and Rivals.RidersRiders takes the lid off international showjumping, a sport where the brave horses are almost human, but the humans behave like animals. The brooding hero, gypsy Jake Lovell, under whose magic hands the most difficult horse or woman becomes biddable, is driven to the top by his loathing of the beautiful bounder and darling of the show ring, Rupert Campbell-Black. Having filched each other's horses, and fought and fornicated their way around the capitals of Europe, the feud between the two men finally erupts with devastating consequences during the Los Angeles Olympics.RivalsInto the cut-throat world of Corinium television comes Declan O'Hara, a mega-star of great glamour and integrity. Living rather too closely across the valley is Rupert Campbell-Black, divorced and as dissolute as ever, and now the Tory Minister for Sport. Declan needs only a few days at Corinium to realise that the Managing Director, Lord Baddingham, is a crook who has recruited him merely to help retain the franchise for Corinium. Baddingham has also enticed Cameron Cook, a gorgeous but domineering woman executive, to produce Declan's programme. Declan and Cameron detest each other, provoking a storm of controversy into which Rupert plunges with his usual abandon. As a rival group emerges to pitch for the franchise, reputations ripen and decline, true love blossoms and burns, marriages are made and shattered, and sex raises its (delicious) head at almost every throw as, in bed and boardroom, the race is on to capture the Cotswold Crown.

    (Nancy Pearl)After eleven years of marriage to an egocentric opera singer, Pat Murray packs up her daughter and leaves, regaining control of her life and approaching single parenthood bravely until she meets Roland and his pregnant wife.

    He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.'Willy Loman has been a salesman for 34 years. At 60, he is cast aside, his usefulness now exhausted. With no future to dream about he must face the crushing disappointments of his past. He takes one final brave action, but is he heroic at last?, or a self-deluding fool?

    This beautifully designed and illustrated book tells the story largely through the eyes of an unknown English patient whose mind is awash with a life's worth of secrets and passions after his plane is shot down near the beginning of World War Two.