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Under the Banyan Tree by Raghbir Dhillon


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Will I Ever Be Enough?: The Golden Effect


C. Monet - 2018
    Not only is it a requirement, but he has six months to make it happen. The journey reveals things about himself that he never took the time to acknowledge. Ever the traveler, Lawrence hasn’t taken the time to make real connections with people until he enlists the help of Brielle Golden. Brielle Golden is a matchmaking extraordinaire that struggles with her own love life. She has all the tools to assist those willing to pay to find something she wants more than anything but thinks she will never have. Love is dodging her, and she doesn’t understand why. In her eyes, she’s the perfect catch, however, the fear of rejection is a powerful emotion to tackle by yourself. As the work begins to help Lawrence find a mate, souls collide, and things start to change within the mutual business partnership. In the midst of sorting feelings out, Brielle's smile changes and Lawrence's heart begins to beat again. But trouble arises forcing them to do something crazy to get them both out of the mess that his fathers’ wishes created. Will Lawrence find a wife and make his father proud by succumbing to The Golden Effect, or will both he and Brielle find themselves surrounded by the darkness of life without love when their partnership comes to an end?

A Bad Boy Captured My Heart


Tay Mo'Nae - 2018
    What’s the point in giving you’re heart to someone, only to have it broken and your trust betrayed? She was perfectly content with the absence of love until Cameron aka Murda enters her life unexpectedly, awakening a need for a connection that she hadn’t realized that she was missing. Cameron just got released from jail after doing a 5 year bid and is back in the streets force. Cam is rude, and trigger happy and won’t hesitate to kill whenever necessary. With a street war going on with an unknown enemy Cameron and his cousin, Justin have too many thing to worry about and love isn’t on his list but meeting Raegan changes that. Cam tries to break the ice around Raegan’s heart but will her closed off behavior make him give up before he starts? Justin and Morgan are together and happy or so it seems. Still dealing with the insecurities from Justin cheating on her Morgan causes unnecessary issues in her relationship. When she takes it too far and a secret is revealed Justin calls it quits and leaves the relationship. Seeing the mistakes she made Morgan struggles trying to get Justin back but will he be willingly to forgive her and come home? Love, wars, and an unexpected reveal from an ex will turn these couples life’s upside down and they’ll have to deal with consequences before it breaks them.

Vaclav & Lena


Haley Tanner - 2011
    They meet as children in an ESL class in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Vaclav is precocious and verbal. Lena, struggling with English, takes comfort in the safety of his adoration, his noisy, loving home, and the care of Rasia, his big-hearted mother. Vaclav imagines their story unfolding like a fairy tale or the perfect illusion from his treasured Magician's Almanac, but among the many truths to be discovered in Haley Tanner's wondrous debut is that happily-ever-after is never a foregone conclusion.One day, Lena does not show up for school. She has disappeared from Vaclav's and his family's lives as if by a cruel magic trick. For the next seven years, Vaclav says goodnight to Lena without fail, wondering if she is doing the same somewhere. On the eve of Lena's seventeenth birthday he finds out.Haley Tanner has the originality and verve of a born storyteller and the boldness to imagine a world in which love can overcome the most difficult circumstances. In Vaclav & Lena she has created two unforgettable young protagonists who evoke the joy, the confusion, and the passion of having a profound, everlasting connection with someone else.

Code Name Hélène


Ariel Lawhon - 2020
    No sooner does Henri sweep Nancy off her feet and convince her to become Mrs. Fiocca than the Germans invade France and she takes yet another name: a code name.As LUCIENNE CARLIER Nancy smuggles people and documents across the border. Her success and her remarkable ability to evade capture earns her the nickname THE WHITE MOUSE from the Gestapo. With a five million franc bounty on her head, Nancy is forced to escape France and leave Henri behind. When she enters training with the Special Operations Executives in Britain, her new comrades are instructed to call her HÉLÈNE. And finally, with mission in hand, Nancy is airdropped back into France as the deadly MADAM ANDRÉ, where she claims her place as one of the most powerful leaders in the French Resistance, armed with a ferocious wit, her signature red lipstick, and the ability to summon weapons straight from the Allied Forces. But no one can protect Nancy if the enemy finds out these four women are one and the same, and the closer to liberation France gets, the more exposed she--and the people she loves--become.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine


Gail Honeyman - 2017
    Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding unnecessary human contact, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen, the three rescue one another from the lives of isolation that they had been living. Ultimately, it is Raymond’s big heart that will help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one. If she does, she'll learn that she, too, is capable of finding friendship—and even love—after all.Smart, warm, uplifting, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes. . . the only way to survive is to open your heart.

This Is How It Always Is


Laurie Frankel - 2017
    He’s five years old, the youngest of five brothers, and loves peanut butter sandwiches. He also loves wearing a dress, and dreams of being a princess.When he grows up, Claude says, he wants to be a girl.Rosie and Penn want Claude to be whoever Claude wants to be. They’re just not sure they’re ready to share that with the world. Soon the entire family is keeping Claude’s secret. Until one day it explodes.This Is How It Always Is is a novel about revelations, transformations, fairy tales, and family. And it’s about the ways this is how it always is: Change is always hard and miraculous and hard again, parenting is always a leap into the unknown with crossed fingers and full hearts, children grow but not always according to plan. And families with secrets don’t get to keep them forever.

This Tender Land


William Kent Krueger - 2019
    It is also home to Odie O’Banion, a lively orphan boy whose exploits constantly earn him the superintendent’s wrath. Odie and his brother, Albert, are the only white faces among the hundreds of Native American children at the school.After committing a terrible crime, Odie and Albert are forced to flee for their lives along with their best friend, Mose, a mute young man of Sioux heritage. Out of pity, they also take with them a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy. Together, they steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi in search for a place to call home.Over the course of one unforgettable summer, these four orphan vagabonds journey into the unknown, crossing paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds. With the feel of a modern classic, This Tender Land is an en­thralling, bighearted epic that shows how the magnificent American landscape connects us all, haunts our dreams, and makes us whole.

Otherworlder (Epic Blade #1)


David J. VanBergen Jr. - 2022
    So real, you might wind up in another world. A LitRPG / GameLit adventure full of monsters, portals, loot, and leveling up. Tobias Martin is one of the best gamers in the world, playing the most advanced game ever created. When a mysterious portal in the game appears, he enters a new world of magic that's more real than he ever could have imagined. Forced to start from scratch, he must build himself back up to a top level adventurer if he ever wants to get home again. Along the way, he will explore a world full of wonder and danger, meet new friends, slay terrifying monsters, and level up like his life depends on it. Because it does. Can Tobias survive the most epic adventure he has ever encountered? Otherworlder is the first book in the Epic Blade series. If you like fast-paced fantasy adventures with RPG gaming elements, you are going to love Epic Blade.

Abundance


Sena Jeter Naslund - 2006
    From the lush gardens of Versailles to the lights and gaiety of Paris, the verdant countryside of France, and finally the stark and terrifying isolation of a prison cell, the young queen's life is joyful, poignant, and harrowing by turns. As her world of unprecedented royal splendor crumbles, the charming Marie Antoinette matures into a heroine of inspiring stature, one whose nobility arises not from the circumstance of her birth but from her courageous spirit.Marie Antoinette was a child of fourteen when her mother, the Empress of Austria, arranged for her to leave her family and her country to become the wife of the fifteen-year-old Dauphin, the future King of France. Coming of age in the most public of arenas, the young queen embraces her new family and the French people, and she is embraced in return. Eager to be a good wife and strong queen, she shows her new husband nothing but love and encouragement, though he repeatedly fails to consummate their marriage and in doing so, fails to give her the thing she—and the people of France—desires most: a child and an heir to the throne.Deeply disappointed and isolated in her own intimate circle apart from the social life of the court, the queen allows herself to remain ignorant of the country's growing economic and political crises. She entrusts her soul to her women friends, her music teacher, her hairdresser, the ambassador from Austria, and a certain Swedish count so handsome that admirers label him "the Picture." When her innocent and well-chaperoned pilgrimage to watch the sun rise is viciously misrepresented in satiric pamphlets as a drunken orgy, the people begin to turn against her. Poor harvests, bitter winters, war debts, and poverty precipitate rebellion and revenge as the royal family and many nobles are caught up in a murderous time known as "the Terror."With penetrant insight into new historical scholarship and with wondrous narrative skill, Naslund offers an intimate, fresh, and dramatic re-creation of this compelling woman that goes beyond popular myth. Abundance reveals a compassionate and spontaneous Marie Antoinette who rejected the formality and rigid protocol of the court; an enchanting and tenderhearted outsider who was loved by her adopted homeland and people until she became the target of revolutionary cruelty and violence; a dethroned queen whose depth of character sustained her in even the worst of times.Once again, Sena Jeter Naslund has shed new light on an important moment of historical change and made that time as real to us as the one we are living now. Exquisitely detailed, beautifully written, heartbreaking and powerful, Abundance is a novel that is impossible to put down.

These Violent Delights


Chloe Gong - 2020
    At the heart of it all is eighteen-year-old Juliette Cai, a former flapper who has returned to assume her role as the proud heir of the Scarlet Gang—a network of criminals far above the law. Their only rivals in power are the White Flowers, who have fought the Scarlets for generations. And behind every move is their heir, Roma Montagov, Juliette’s first love…and first betrayal.But when gangsters on both sides show signs of instability culminating in clawing their own throats out, the people start to whisper. Of a contagion, a madness. Of a monster in the shadows. As the deaths stack up, Juliette and Roma must set their guns—and grudges—aside and work together, for if they can’t stop this mayhem, then there will be no city left for either to rule.Perfect for fans of The Last Magician and Descendant of the Crane, this heart-stopping debut is an imaginative Romeo and Juliet retelling set in 1920s Shanghai, with rival gangs and a monster in the depths of the Huangpu River.

Murder on Music Row


Stuart Dill - 2011
    Meanwhile, Ripley’s label, Galaxy Records, is preparing a secret merger agreement that would create the largest record conglomerate in the world. Trouble arises when rumors spread that Ripley and Simon are withholding Ripley’s new album in hopes of renegotiating his contract.When Simon and Judd are shot on the famed Grand Ole Opry stage during the filming of Ripley’s new music video, no one is more upset than Ripley—especially as everyone assumes the shots were meant for him. While Simon’s life hangs in the balance, Judd seeks help from Megan Olsen, Simon’s right hand and Ripley’s day-to-day manager. The two set off on a high-powered chase to disclose the real motive behind the shootings and spare Ripley from a second murder attempt.Not unlike John Grisham’s legal thrillers and Michael Crichton’s science-based thrillers, Stuart Dill’s “music industry thriller” can now be added to the literary lexicon. Murder on Music Row leads readers through a maze of twists and turns that connect Nashville, New York, Los Angeles, and London in a behind-the-scenes look at an industry where there are no limits in the pursuit of money, power, and fame.

Nevermore, The Complete Series: Twin Souls, Hybrid, Sacrifice, and Destiny


K.A. Poe - 2013
    What generally means a step into adulthood instead opens its way to a terrifying truth about not only her family, but herself. She comes from a long line of vampire hunters, and her real dad wants her to carry on the family quest. At the same time, she is falling for a new boy at school who has his own secret. He is a vampire. Alexis is forced to make a decision from which there is no turning back. - Will she deny this newly discovered heritage, or embrace it? Nevermore, The Complete Series is a bundle of the entire Nevermore collection. It contains all four full length novels: Twin Souls Hybrid Sacrifice Destiny

Forbidden Love with a Thug


Shvonne Latrice - 2020
    With no way to make ends meet, she turns to the world of stripping in order to keep herself afloat. Jersey feels that she is simply existing, and finds nothing interesting about her life, until she meets Tommy Brownson. Tommy is cute, sweet, persistent, and patient. Jersey finds herself smitten with him, but soon after becomes just short of infatuated with his frenemy Kilexis Camren. Conflicted, Jersey is having a hard time figuring out if she wants the kind and gentle Tommy, after all he did approach her first, or the mysterious, rugged, and frank Kilexis. Not able to decide right away, Jersey dabbles with both, showing a much more favortism to the latter. Will she be able to pick in enough time to preserve the losing man's feelings? Or will fate choose for her, causing a heightened rivalry between the men? Cheyla Austin is a pill popping stripper, who has no idea where she wants to go in life, and to honest she's perfectly okay with that. Living life one day at a time, and having to answer to no one, has proved to be Cheyla's method for achieving contentment. She has no interest in dating anyone who may disrupt her easy going and detached life, until she meets the sexy, ambitious, and clever Kantwan Camren. Kantwan is a no nonsense guy, and refuses to be with a woman who will cower when met with true love or hardwork. Will Cheyla be able to mature into the woman Kantwan needs? Or will she continue to live life as a disconnected and afraid little girl, causing her to lose out on the man of every girl's dreams? Ivy Horne, hasn't had it easy for the past few years. With her child's father being thrown in jail for reckless petty robberies, she is forced to make sure her son has everything he needs. In order to put food into her son Donovan's mouth, she joins best friends Jersey and Cheyla, by dancing every night for cash. Her plan is to focus on making money, while looking for a new job to obtain before her man Portland comes home. In addition to that, there are no ifs, ands, or buts about her being faithful to Portland while put away. That all changes upon meeting the intelligent, handsome, and aggressive Elijah Camren, who tries to show Ivy that she is way too good to hold a man down that has been so disloyal to her in the past. When Ivy falls for Elijah's charm, just a teeny bit, she is stuck with having feelings for him even when Portland returns. Will she dibble and dabble like Jersey? Or will fate have to pick for her as well? Everyone seems to be in a love that's forbidden, frowned upon, or just downright wrong. Follow Jersey, Cheyla, and Ivy, as they all share forbidden love with a thug.

The Ones Left Behind: A Traditional Regency Romance (Brethren in Arms Book 4)


Elizabeth Johns - 2021
    

The Aviator's Wife


Melanie Benjamin - 2013
    Enthralled by Charles’s assurance and fame, Anne is certain the aviator has scarcely noticed her. But she is wrong. Charles sees in Anne a kindred spirit, a fellow adventurer, and her world will be changed forever. The two marry in a headline-making wedding. In the years that follow, Anne becomes the first licensed female glider pilot in the United States. But despite this and other major achievements, she is viewed merely as the aviator’s wife. The fairy-tale life she once longed for will bring heartbreak and hardships, ultimately pushing her to reconcile her need for love and her desire for independence, and to embrace, at last, life’s infinite possibilities for change and happiness.Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more.