But her husband Max disagrees - more than that, he wants a divorce. When they separate, there is no mention of the unborn children they created together, still waiting at the clinic.The Zoe falls in love again, out of the blue, and finds herself with an unexpected second chance to have a family.But Max has found a new life too - one with no place in it for people like Zoe. And he will stand up in court to say that her new choice of partner makes her an unfit mother.Jodi Picoult's most powerful novel yet asks who has the right to decide what makes the ideal family?

    Head down and deep into a job, an eleven-year-old son, and a failing marriage, she hasn't got time for jury duty. Who does? However, the county court has other ideas. Serving on an all-female jury, she is forced to deliberate about more than the trial at hand. Old memories surface and Leigh makes a deliberate decision to take a hard look at her life and where it is going. I've certainly been there. Haven't you?

    According to the ancient historian Josephus, two women and five children survived. Based on this tragic and iconic event, Hoffman's novel is a spellbinding tale of four extraordinarily bold, resourceful, and sensuous women, each of whom has come to Masada by a different path. Yael's mother died in childbirth, and her father, an expert assassin, never forgave her for that death. Revka, a village baker's wife, watched the horrifically brutal murder of her daughter by Roman soldiers; she brings to Masada her young grandsons, rendered mute by what they have witnessed. Aziza is a warrior's daughter, raised as a boy, a fearless rider and an expert marksman who finds passion with a fellow soldier. Shirah, born in Alexandria, is wise in the ways of ancient magic and medicine, a woman with uncanny insight and power. The lives of these four complex and fiercely independent women intersect in the desperate days of the siege. All are dovekeepers, and all are also keeping secrets - about who they are, where they come from, who fathered them, and whom they love.

    Deborah Feldman, author of the explosive New York Times– bestselling memoir Unorthodox, returns with an extraordinary follow-up that traces her new life as an independent young woman and single mother, and her search for an authentic and personal Jewish identity.

    Rami Elhanan is Israeli. They inhabit a world of conflict that colors every aspect of their daily lives, from the roads they are allowed to drive on, to the schools their daughters, Abir and Smadar, each attend, to the checkpoints, both physical and emotional, they must negotiate.Their worlds shift irreparably after ten-year-old Abir is killed by a rubber bullet and thirteen-year-old Smadar becomes the victim of suicide bombers. When Bassam and Rami learn of each other's stories, they recognize the loss that connects them and they attempt to use their grief as a weapon for peace.McCann crafts Apeirogon out of a universe of fictional and nonfictional material. He crosses centuries and continents, stitching together time, art, history, nature, and politics in a tale both heartbreaking and hopeful. Musical, cinematic, muscular, delicate, and soaring, Apeirogon is a novel for our time.

    Having entered the Church more by default than through any great calling, he struggles to inject some life into his ailing parish. His wife Christine longs for them to escape the endless rounds of coffee mornings and cake sales. Then Theo, a child at her school, starts to exhibit strange marks on his hands and feet that vanish almost as soon as they have appeared. What has produced these marks - is it physical violence or something stranger? And why has the previous vicar of St Joseph's ended up in a psychiatric hospital?

    Living in the first part of the eighteenth century in Podolia and Wolhynia, the Baal-Shem braved scorn and rejection from the rabbinical establishment and attracted followers from among the common people, the poor, and the mystically inclined. Here Buber offers a sensitive and intuitive account of Hasidism, followed by twenty stories about the life of the Baal-Shem. This book is the earliest and one of the most delightful of Buber's seven volumes on Hasidism and can be read not only as a collection of myth but as a key to understanding the central theme of Buber's thought: the I-Thou, or dialogical, relationship.All positive religion rests on an enormous simplification of the manifold and wildly engulfing forces that invade us: it is the subduing of the fullness of existence. All myth, in contrast, is the expression of the fullness of existence, its image, its sign; it drinks incessantly from the gushing fountains of life.--Martin Buber, from the introduction

    Adrift, confused, she is a girl trying to find her way in a world that seems to either neglect or despise her. Her salvation arrives in an unlikely form: Bridget O'Connell, an Irish maid working for a wealthy Boston family. The catch? Bridget lives only in the pages of a dusty old 1920s diary Natalie unearthed in her mother's basement. But the life she describes is as troubling - and mysterious - as the one Natalie is trying to navigate herself, almost a century later. I am writing this down because this is my story. There were only ever two people who knew my secret, and both are gone before me.Who was Bridget, and what became of her? Natalie escapes into the diary, eager to unlock its secrets, and reluctantly accepts the help of library archivist Kathleen Lynch, a widow with her own painful secret: she's estranged from her only daughter. Kathleen sees in Natalie traces of the daughter she has lost, and in Bridget, another spirited young woman at risk. What could an Irish immigrant domestic servant from the 1920s teach them both? As the troubles of a very modern world close in around them, and Natalie's torments at school escalate, the faded pages of Bridget's journal unite the lonely girl and the unhappy widow - and might even change their lives forever.

    Louisa, the spirited eldest daughter of Herzig and Clara Steinbacher, has her whole life ahead of her. She is seventeen, and dreams of the "outside world" beyond her doorstep. But when Clara dies in childbirth, Louisa is suddenly thrust into adulthood-with the burden of her mother's responsibilities...and the care of her younger siblings. The only world she has ever known closes around her.Then Herzig, an elder in their strict Mennonite community, hires young, handsome Thomas to help on the farm. Thomas is hardworking, honest...and not of the Faith. But Louisa can't hide her growing feelings for him. Her choices set in motion a transformation she never expected. But at what cost?

    Daniel is handsome, passionate and is part of the kind of large, chaotically loving family Sarah longed for as an only child.When Daniel introduces her to a charismatic young couple, rabbi Menachem Lev and his wife, Chani, despite herself, Sarah is drawn in by the vibrant community at the beachside synagogue. By the time the couple move to the Jamison Valley, where Menachem and Chani have established a community of believers, Sarah can't imagine life without the joy, purpose and love she's discovered.Four years on, youthful passion has given way to something darker. The community will celebrate its first wedding, between the beautiful convert, Avital, and a much older divorcee, but no one seems to be able to give a clear explanation of where Rebecca, his wife, has gone. In the lead up to the wedding a series of terrifying truths emerges that rock Sarah's world and cause her to question everything - her faith, her marriage, and her future.

    To his surprise, when he found the house he was greeted by Dalia Ashkenazi Landau, a nineteen-year-old Israeli college student, whose family fled Europe for Israel following the Holocaust. On the stoop of their shared home, Dalia and Bashir began a rare friendship, forged in the aftermath of war and tested over the next thirty-five years in ways that neither could imagine on that summer day in 1967. Based on extensive research, and springing from his enormously resonant documentary that aired on NPR’s Fresh Air in 1998, Sandy Tolan brings the Israeli-Palestinian conflict down to its most human level, suggesting that even amid the bleakest political realities there exist stories of hope and reconciliation.

    She was born during the War of Independence in the 1940s and disappears on a cold winter night in the 1990s.

    

    YESJamie Goldberg is cool with volunteering for his local state senate candidate—as long as he’s behind the scenes. When it comes to speaking to strangers (or, let’s face it, speaking at all to almost anyone), Jamie’s a choke artist. There’s no way he’d ever knock on doors to ask people for their votes…until he meets Maya.NOMaya Rehman’s having the worst Ramadan ever. Her best friend is too busy to hang out, her summer trip is canceled, and now her parents are separating. Why her mother thinks the solution to her problems is political canvassing—with some awkward dude she hardly knows—is beyond her.MAYBE SOGoing door to door isn’t exactly glamorous, but maybe it’s not the worst thing in the world. After all, the polls are getting closer—and so are Maya and Jamie. Mastering local activism is one thing. Navigating the cross-cultural romance of the century is another thing entirely.

    Now middle-aged, he and his partner, Martin, an African-American actor, are getting by on the residuals from Martin’s cancelled TV cop series when Danny gets an offer he can’t refuse: a speaking gig in a Minnesota bible college that will net him a small fortune. Why me? Silverman wonders, but he’ll take the money and run. What can happen? Only a record-breaking snowstorm that traps him under the same roof as the evangelical Christian faculty who see this Jewish homosexual writer from San Francisco as the incarnation of the anti-Christ. Forced to defend all he believes in—sexual equality, human rights, same-sex marriage; dancing! vodka! coffee!—Silverman finds himself on the front lines of the culture wars dividing the nation today.