All that’s missing is a child. When Janie, an abandoned six-year-old, turns up at their hospital, Christopher forms an instant connection with her, and he convinces Hannah they should take her home as their own.But Janie is no ordinary child, and her damaged psyche proves to be more than her new parents were expecting. Janie is fiercely devoted to Christopher, but she acts out in increasingly disturbing ways, directing all her rage at Hannah. Unable to bond with Janie, Hannah is drowning under the pressure, and Christopher refuses to see Janie’s true nature.Hannah knows that Janie is manipulating Christopher and isolating him from her, despite Hannah’s attempts to bring them all together. But as Janie’s behavior threatens to tear Christopher and Hannah apart, the truth behind Janie’s past may be enough to push them all over the edge.

    . .A small-town girl who conquers the Big City on her own terms . . . a sucker for happy endings with an attraction to all things fattening—and a personality that oddly gets her in (and out of) trouble at lightning speed. This is her story . . . and perhaps a little of yours, too. True, Vivian Livingston has the gig of a lifetime, starring 24/7 as the heroine of www.Vivianlives.com, a kind of “girls rule” Web site. But it wasn’t always that way. So rewind, back to the traditionally traumatic last semester of college, when Vivian, feeling the need for drastic change, randomly enters a songwriting contest and, to everyone’s surprise, actually wins. The prize—an incredible weekend getaway to the capital of the universe: New York City.One amazing weekend getaway later, without a real “life” plan and weeks away from graduation, she and her best friend Sophie make the obvious decision . . . NYC here we come! But the moment Vivian and Sophie set foot in their new apartment—a raw, hand-me-down, fourth-floor walk-up studio—they know that life in the Big Apple is going to be anything but easy. Lacking both dough and direction, Vivian has a rough time with the transition. Even worse, Sophie seems to have found a soul mate—and has left Vivian behind. But Vivian is determined to make her world work, despite a few challenging bumps in the road. Rather than ship out, things begin to shape up, as Vivian not only gets the (virtual) keys to the city, but most important, discovers the keys to her own heart.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    Struggling to raise her little brother, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible "adult" around. She finds peace in the starry Midwestern night sky above the fields behind her house. One night everything changes when she witnesses one of her father's thugs, Kellen, a tattooed ex-con with a heart of gold, wreck his motorcycle. What follows is a powerful and shocking love story between two unlikely people that asks tough questions, reminding us of all the ugly and wonderful things that life has to offer.

    After all, isn’t it selfish to grieve when the departed goes to a better place? Being in charge of the funeral for his grandmother, Nanna, John arranges for a happy atmosphere, but not everyone understands. Tabitha, his twelve-year-old daughter, who is attending her first funeral, perceives the conflict in a very personal way. During the days before Nanna’s death, Tabitha had been comforted by dreams of the lady’s glorious entrance into Heaven, but she truly misses Nanna’s presence and wonders if her inner yearnings are wrong.    Tabitha has also had dreams about her best friend, Rose Grayson, haunting dreams that showed her friend as lost and in terror in the afterworld. No, Rose is not a Christian. In fact, her father, Phil, is an atheist, a bold atheist. Phil and Rose attend Nanna’s funeral, and when Tabitha claims to see a vision of her departed great grandmother, Phil suggests to John that Tabitha should undergo therapeutic counseling. John decides on another path, but the conflict raises doubts about his daughter’s mental and spiritual stability.

    Bound up in the laws of Einstein’s theories, these lessons will ultimately influence Jake’s own career as an astronomer. Out on the creek, both father and son conquer their greatest challenges: marital infidelity, professional setbacks, and Jake’s long term, passionate obsession with his childhood crush.The Constant Heart is a potent, and moving book that utilizes the laws of nature and science to illuminate what it means to be a man today. It is an inspiring book that most immediately celebrates the bonds of father and son while exploring the beauty and intensity of love and the profound attachments between human beings, even in the face of great disease and danger.

    One runs for her life. One is left behind.Twenty-eight years ago, Charlotte and Samantha Quinn's happy small-town family life was torn apart by a terrifying attack on their family home. It left their mother dead. It left their father—Pikeville's notorious defense attorney—devastated. And it left the family fractured beyond repair, consumed by secrets from that terrible night.Twenty-eight years later, Charlotte has followed in her father's footsteps to become a lawyer herself—the ideal good daughter. But when violence comes to Pikeville again, and a shocking tragedy leaves the whole town traumatized, Charlotte is plunged into a nightmare. Not only is she the first witness on the scene, but it's a case that unleashes the terrible memories she's spent so long trying to suppress--because the shocking truth about the crime that destroyed her family nearly thirty years ago won't stay buried forever. Packed with twists and turns, brimming with emotion and heart, The Good Daughter is fiction at its most thrilling.

    Some fishing, some barbecue, some games...The Fannelli brothers are heading to Crescent Lake too. Some stalking, some kidnapping, some murder, definitely some games...though not necessarily the type of games the Lamberts had in mind. But it doesn't matter. The Lamberts are going to play whether they like it or not.An intense psychological thriller, Bad Games has the dark, mind-bending chills of The Bad Seed combined with the fish-out-of-water dread and suspense of Deliverance. So let Jeff Menapace's highly anticipated suspense thriller keep you up all night as it delves into the mystery of nature versus nurture when comprehending the evil in man, along with the will and determination an innocent family must summon to fight back against horrific odds.

    When fortune deserts Jai and his carefully ordered life spins inexorably out of control, Jai stands on the brink of ruin. Only a delayed monsoon can save Jai’s biggest project from disaster, but there are millions across the land praying for the exact opposite. Reason seems to have its limits - the weather defies all prediction, let alone control. Will Jai relinquish the beliefs of a lifetime? Will he reconcile with the awful ambiguity about his past? Will he be able to save his crumbling marriage?

    Set primarily among the working-class of a Seattle suburb called Federal Way, this highly original novel-told in the form of interlinked short stories- extols the lives of a large cast of characters lost in various modes of darkness and despair. Whether struggling to come together or desperately alone, they grapple with dark compulsions and heart-rending afflictions. As if trapped at the bottom of a well, they search for relief, for a vehicle into the light they know is up and outside.They search in sex, in drugs and violence, and in visions of Apocalypse and Creation, dreams of angels and killers and local sports championships. Compact, finely wrought, powerfully charged, Well ultimately rises toward the light, in a finale which echoes with the exhilarating human capacity for hope. The result is a mesmerizing tour de force that will establish Matthew McIntosh as a bold and progressive new voice of American fiction.Stories:BURLESQUESnapshots of various troubled couples on the day that the Seattle SuperSonics lose their chance at advancing to the NBA finals. Len and Adda are fighting- Len is in love with Adda (she is "the girl he wanted") but she is torn, and is leaving the next day to spend a week with her fiancée to make sure that breaking up with him is the right thing. Len becomes jealously enraged when he finds out Adda and her fiancée will be sleeping in the same bed, begging her not to touch the man.Nate and Sammie are also fighting: Sammie insists that a certain girl who is trying to convert Nate stop calling their house. Nate gets tired of Sammie's hysteria and beats her, only to become terrified at what he has done.A first person narrator recalls his rather pathetic adventures with prostitutes in Thailand, where he made big money at an English language newspaper and lived like a king. He brought a woman over who now resents him for it, and they have a staid marriage while he continues to dream over prostitutes.Raymond and his wife are at the SuperSonics game and get in a fight when Ray's wife sees he is ogling cheerleaders through his binoculars. He misses it when the team loses at the buzzer.The SuperSonics janitor comes home to his wife, who is pregnant. He masturbates as he recalls the time he slipped out to watch a burlesque show at the strip joint across the street.MODERN COLOR / MODERN LOVEII. Shelly is a Korean 16-year-old boarding school student who likes having sex with strangers in bars and doing crystal meth. She falls a sleep and crashes her car through a fence, causing her mother to cry and call her "A Real American Whore" when she picks her up in prison. She meets an older man who takes her in but finally gets sick of giving her money to drink and sends her home. When her mother isn't home, she goes to the nearest bar.III. A phone sex patron can't make up his mind what he wants his fantasy to be and the story concludes: "Do you realize what this is costing?"IV. The story of Davin, a warehouse worker, and Sarah, who are in a band together. Davin is loving and committed to Sarah but Sarah doesn't see a future with him. She gets pregnant and they grow distant. One day Davin gets in a fight with a co-worker and is paralyzed on his left side after being hit in the skull. Sarah takes care of him in the hospital, but when he returns home he begins drinking. One night he picks the 2-year-old up while drunk and Sarah becomes hysterical when the child begins crying. He beats Sarah and is issued a restraining order. Sarah moves out and eventually begins dating a construction worker she does not really love.CHICKENA group of guys gets into a game of chicken with a car containing a guy and a bunch of girls. When the guys cut the girls off suddenly, the driver of the latter car approaches the guys in an insane rage and finally hits the driver in the nose.Santos and his young partner work at a hotel-they go to Denny's when they should be training an Ethiopian who messes up on his first day. The guys get fired for this and Santos, humiliated, tells the young partner about the time he made a buzzer shot in a college basketball game only to have the game-winning points taken away from him by the refs.A kid drops some pills at the bus station and gets stuck on the Greyhound listening to a vet recount his experience in Guam, where he dug a whole to save himself from gunfire.VITALITYSPACEMAN: Charlie is a lonely gay bartender who has started to feel old and fat. Although he loves bartending and meeting people, etc., he loses his job because he has kept drinking on the job after repeated warnings. He laments that he has never been in love. On the night he loses his job he goes home to try to clean his filthy house but ends up vomiting into the toilet, longing for company.DAMAGE: A young man enters a peep bbbbbbooth with his friends and is struck by his ugly reflection as he looks at the beautiful dancer. When his friends begin teasing the dancer by sticking their tongue out, the bouncers approach them and a brawl ensues. The young man "pounds the Living Holy Fuck" out of the bouncers.ACHE:A man begins experience atrocious cyclical spells of pain, incoherence, and anxiety after he dives into a swimming pool one day and hits his head on the bottom. His parents take him to all variety of specialists who prescribe drugs, etc. and eventually he becomes dependent on them, and a drunk. He moves to London to get away from it all and meets a girl who wants to marry him but eventually assaults her in a fit of hysteria. He moves back home and lives a quiet life. When the pain is gone, he discovers that he misses it.THEY ALL WAIT FOR YOU:A man finds out that he will die of cancer and spends his day at the Trolley bar, getting hammered and thinking about the pointlessness of it all.ONE MOREA man walks into a pharmacy with a fake prescription. The pharmacist dials 911 but before the police come he shoots himself.GUNMANThe gruesome last days of two gunmen-one who killed his family before racing through the city on a killing spree as he fled from the cops, the other a man who shot a city bus driver- are recreated in a frank, reportorial manner.FISHBOYThe narrator, a somewhat pathetic naïf whose father wrecked the home by cheating on his catatonic mother, develops a crush on a girl who works at a fish restaurant. He goes on a date with her but is rejected when he attempts to grope her at her front door. Gradually he becomes obsessed with her, writing her love letters and visiting her even though she doesn't want to see him again. After he threatens to jump off her roof, her father tries to set him straight, eventually punching him in the face. He is offered admission at a fisheries school in Nebraska and goes there to get away from Seattle, but finds it isn't what he bargained for, and becomes bored. He lies by the highway and in a somewhat magical-realism passage two guys stop their car and begin taking his body apart until he has turned into a fish, gasping for air on the highwayside. It starts to rain and he finds himself "there, somewhere, in-between."GRACEA Jesus-loving woman develops a mysterious degenerative illness and is forced to spend the rest of her days in a home, putting up a front of hope but knowing that she is on her way out.LOOKING OUT FOR YOUR OWNThe narrator remembers his first love, a girl without a mother and an abusive father. It is an innocent relationship-the narrator is plagued by sexual hang-ups and the girl cries after intercourse. When the narrator accidentally gets her pregnant, the girl's father storm into his house and almost chokes him to death. Thinking about his mentally retarded brother that his parents institutionalized and about the beatings his girlfriend has taken from her father, the narrator breaks up with the girl because he feels guilty that he can't take care of his own.

    The story is simple. An e-writer called Ali or Alix will write to order anything you like, provided that you are prepared to enter the story as yourself and take the risk of leaving it as someone else. You can be the hero of your own life. You can have freedom just for one night. But there is a price to pay.

    Away from the rest of the world, this perfect escape is interrupted by a motley parade of misfits who show up and change his plans. A hired beauty, a fireman, and an eccentric British real estate agent desperately trying to stay in the country all suddenly find themselves tangled together in a beach house where the mood is anything but sunny.This pithy piece portrays a scenario of attempted suicide with mordant humour, where a basis of social alienation leads to unexpected connections. The richly-drawn characters are quick-witted and narcissistic yet self-aware and the dialogue is fluid and witty."All New People" is centred around a clever concept which works as a catalyst for both angst-fuelled scrutiny and morbid humour.

    All but one of the surviving women have conceived, and two students, plus their professor, are said to have died. In the glare of the world's media, every survivor sticks to the same unconvincing version of events. Piece-by-piece the narrator examines the evidence and conducts interviews with the survivors, to work out exactly what happened on the island during that year. Slowly, a disturbing picture emerges of feral humans driven by rivalry and sexual tension ...a 'Lord of the Flies' scenario for adults that suspiciously seems to test the dead professor's theory that by nature people are no different from apes in the wild.

    "The Watershed Years" takes place immediately after World War II following the lives of the Arbuckles, a ranching family on the vast plains of eastern Montana.

    For I saw Fionnuala,"The Gem of the Roe," "The Flower of Sweet Strabane,"when a girl reached down into a freezer binto bring up my double scoop of vanilla.-"White Shoulders"Seamus Heaney has called his colleague Paul Muldoon "one of the era's true originals." While Muldoon's previous book, The Annals of Chile, was poetry at an extreme of wordplay and formal complexity, Hay is made up of shorter, clearer lyric poems, retaining all of Muldoon's characteristic combination of wit and profundity but appealing to the reader in new and delightful ways. His eighth book, it is also his most inviting-full of joy in language, fascination with popular culture, and enthusiasm for the writing of poetry itself. This is the first of his books to really capture the effect of America on his poetic sensibility, which is like a magnet for impressions and the miscellany of the culture.

    April 15, 2001 should have been just another Sunday night. But a news headline landing in Lisa's email inbox changes everything: "Joey Ramone is dead." The death of one of her teenage heroes serves as an long-overdue wake-up call causing Lisa to examine her life and how she's lived it, from her youth as a poet on the streets of the East Village to 10 years later, all grown up with a career and a fiance. Add to the mix Jake McDaniel, lead singer of million-selling, critically-regarded Seattle band Blue Electric, known better to Lisa as the starving renegades who lived next door to her when she first arrived in Seattle. In the midst of an unexpectedly heated argument with the fiance over the historical relevance (or not) of the Ramones - which forces Lisa to face the truth about her relationship - Jake writes and invites Lisa to LA. Throwing what seems like half her cd collection in the car, along with a wardrobe consisting of high heels, jeans and t-shirts, Lisa starts driving from Seattle to LA in the middle of the night, accompanied by music, memories, and the ghosts of the past. Arriving in LA, she finds refuge, but also collides with her past, present and future; decisions need to be made, and this time, Lisa stands her ground.