For a while, she found a safe haven in her marriage to bestselling crime novelist Stephen Ludlow—until his car skidded into Echo Bay. But Stephen’s wasn’t the only body pulled from the icy waters that night. When details about a mysterious violet-eyed blonde become public, a media circus ensues, and Christy-Lynn runs again.Desperate for answers, she’s shattered to learn that Stephen and his mistress had a child—a little girl named Iris, who now lives in poverty with her ailing great-grandmother. The thought of Iris abandoned to the foster care system—as Christy-Lynn once was—is unbearable. But she’s spent her whole life running—determined never to be hurt again. Will she finally stand still long enough to open herself up to forgiveness and love?

    Harriet Holding is a hesitant teacher who has never married (she can't explain why, even to herself). Courtney Gray struggles to escape her Southern Living lifestyle. Catherine Wilson, a sculptor, is suffocating in her happy third marriage. Anna Todd is a world-famous romance novelist escaping her own tragedies through her fiction. And finally there is Baby, the girl they come to bury - along with their memories of her rebellions and betrayals.

    Having spent her first full year away at college, she has gained a new appreciation for her peaceful home and new friend, Walter. Walter jumps at the chance to work at Quail Crossings when the opportunity presents itself. Not only does Walter want to learn his chosen trade of agriculture, but he also wants to be closer to Alice who has resisted his romantic advances. The peaceful summer Alice has envisioned with her family and friend quickly dissolves as a stranger arrives proclaiming Quail Crossings as his own. Between the stranger and a natural disaster, the only home Alice has ever known could be destroyed forever. Alice and the whole clan must put their lives in danger to save the very thing that has brought them together … Quail Crossings ... or say goodbye to it forever.

    She’s tough, opinionated, bossy, and she’s got a bone to pick with nearly everyone in her life.Set in the fictitious Eastern North Carolina small town of Shelbington, Angeline has been given a terminal diagnosis, with mere months left to live. Upon learning of this news, her adult children and grandchildren come home for one last visit. There is no love lost between any of the family members, and they all have secrets that they voluntarily or involuntarily reveal throughout the course of the novel, culminating in an explosive family dinner at which the biggest bombshells are dropped.Told in first-person narratives by the main protagonist and other characters, the story uses humor to touch on a number of hot-button issues, from race relations and racial profiling to LGBTQ issues, to the #MeToo movement, and to the subjugation of religion for profit.As Bette Davis once said in the 1950 movie All About Eve, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night!”

    She is intelligent, but has trouble with words. How is she going to survive when her father is hanged for murder and her mother dies, leaving her alone? Ben Scott, an artist she has met only once, finds her at this crucial time and takes her back to his landlady, who gives her a home. The people living in the house become her family, and, step-by-step, the past is put behind her. In 1939 she marries a young doctor, John Sterling, and her happiness is complete. Then war comes to tear her family apart. John is killed during an air raid, and Ben is reported missing. Is she destined to lose the two men she adores? And how many painful steps will it take to regain her happiness?

    Her only friend is Jerome, an anorexic drag queen who searches for love among the sailors.As Catherine and Jerome set out for Hollywood, we witness -with equal horror and fascination -- their desperate attempt to find redemption in a world that offers them so little.In haunting, stylized prose, Nugent takes us deep into her protagonist's psyche while painting a bizarre -- yet oddly familiar -- picture of a dissociated, disconnected America. Live Girls is a tour de force that will leave no one who reads it unshaken.From the Hardcover edition.

    Rosie is very happy with her handsome husband and a fulfilling career as job counselor for the developmentally challenged. It might not be glamorous work, but Rosie is proud of the fact that she cares more about people than Prada. What more could a woman want in life? Except maybe being able to wear a sexy thong that doesn't make her behind look like a rump roast in butcher string…  But when Rosie's incredible husband turns out to be an incredible putz--sleeping with her best friend Inga--her life goes from Seventh Heaven to Jerry Springer in the blink of an eye and the tip of a wine glass.  Alone and deceived, but with her sense of humor still intact, Rosie turns to her wonderfully wacky mother to help her bounce back. Of course, Ma's recipe for mental recovery leaves much to be desired.  And after Rosie discovers a painful family secret, hidden behind years of lies, she must set out to find herself and what really matters in life.  Along the way, Rosie is surprised to find help from Mickey Hamilton, a.k.a. Ham, who is kind, generous, and has a great butt to match.  If only Rosie can overlook the fact that he's nicknamed after the meat section at the local supermarket he manages.  Milton, one of Rosie's endearing mentally challenged clients--and Ham's employee--also becomes a source of comfort along the way, always ready to defend "Miss Plow's" honor and warm her heart, even as it's breaking. And can a twenty-five-year-old punk office assistant with hair like candy corn really become Rosie's new best friend?  As she moves along the twisted road to self-discovery, Rosie finds happiness, acceptance, and even love - though none of it in the places she'd expected.   With laugh-out-loud scenes seamlessly interspersed among gut-wrenching moments of heartache, Starting Out Sideways is a unique and utterly delightful novel that will make you laugh, cry, and remember what's truly important in life.

    But Bob Dollar is determined to see his new job as hog site scout for Global Pork Rind through to the end. However he is forced to face the idiosyncratic inhabitants of Woolybucket and to question his own notions of loyalty and home.A brilliant novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain. That Old Ace in the Hole is a richly textured story of one man's struggle to make good in the inhospitable ranch country of the Texas panhandle, told with razor-sharp wit and a masterly sense of place.

    Since she left home, Sonya has lived on the run, free of any ties, while her soft-spoken sister, Trisha, has created a perfect suburban life, and her ambitious sister, Marin, has built her own successful career. But as these women come together, their various methods of coping with a terrifying history can no longer hold their memories at bay.Buried secrets rise to the surface as their father—the victim of humiliating racism and perpetrator of horrible violence—remains unconscious. As his condition worsens, the daughters and their mother wrestle with private hopes for his survival or death, as well as their own demons and buried secrets. Told with forceful honesty, Trail of Broken Wings reveals the burden of shame and secrets, the toxicity of cruelty and aggression, and the exquisite, liberating power of speaking and owning truth.

    She seems wonderful, and it is love at first sight, and they marry quickly. However, not all is rosy in the garden, and a lifetime’s baggage rears its ugly head. Pablo’s ex-wife re-establishes contact with him, and he desperately seeks to exorcise the demons of that betrayal and divorce, but he gets drawn into a double life. Then, one shocking day, Hellion goes to work, and inexplicably, and without warning, fails to return home. Now he has to try to understand another devastating, bewildering calamity.Til Death We Do Part, Too is a story that scrutinises the impact of unfinished business, baggage, emotional damage, and lingering love. It balances heart-breaking loss with resilience, disorientation with hope, and desperation and bitterness with true enduring love and understanding. There is much insight into the reality of relationships and the frailty of the human psyche. It is told with immense depth of feeling, humour, and faith.

    A faction has moved in and run roughshod over the town and the ranches, including the G Bar.In “McQueen of the Tumbling K,” ranch foreman Ward McQueen looks out for his boss, Ruth Kermitt. When Jim Yount shows up at the Tumbling K looking to buy cattle to stock worthless land he won in a poker game, McQueen can’t help but question his true intentions.In “Four Card Draw,” Allen Ring wins the Red Rock Ranch in a poker game, but he soon finds that he has stepped into a hotbed of fear and danger; several years back, Sam Hazlitt was killed on the Red Rock, and his record book—which could discredit many of the ranchers—went missing.In “Mistakes Can Kill You,” Johnny O’Day had accounted for six dead men by the time he turned seventeen. Close to death from pneumonia, he’s taken in by the Redlins. O’Day pays the family back by staying on and working, but now he must decide whether to leave or risk his life to save their biological son, Sam.In “Showdown on the Tumbling T,” after two years in Mexico, Wat Bell runs into his cousin, whom he considers his best friend, only to learn he’s been blamed for the death of their uncle. Although his cousin offers to help, a series of events makes Bell suspect something much more sinister is going on.

    He takes up the challenge of wintering it out on Bullock Creek Station,on the bleak slopes of the Barker Range,and has to use all his knowledge,experience,ingenuity and luck to get himself and the widow and the stock alive through the worst winter on record.There's a bit of skulduggery going on and The Doughroaster deals with it in his own unique and entertaining way. Bullock Creek is an adventure story about a rapidly-disappearing lifestyle,written in the vivid style that distinguishes Barry Crump's writing. and which has been enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of readers,both here and abroad.

    But everything Parris believes about her life is rocked to the core when she discovers that Emma, the mother she believed dead, is very much alive.Compelled to discover the roots of this decades-long deception, Parris goes in search of her mother in France, but the meeting only opens old wounds for them both. Hurt and disillusioned, Parris finds solace in two new friends, Leslie and Celeste. Both have difficult relationships with their own mothers, and both, like Parris, are coming to terms with a legacy of long-buried secrets. And as Emma returns to the States, spurring unexpected revelations, the bond that Parris, Leslie and Celeste forge will sustain them on a journey from heartbreak to healing.Compelling, candid and wise, What Mother Never Told Me is an unforgettable story about the power of our pasts to define us—and sometimes to hold us back. It is a novel about abiding love and hidden truths, about family bonds that may be tested but never truly broken, about the lies that tear us apart—and the friendships that can make us whole again.

    She also acquires a new family: mother-in-law Audrey, disapproving and suspicious of Skyla’s nomadic past; father-in-law Walt, gruff but kind; and Thomas’s brothers, sofa-bound Jeffrey, and Dennis, who moved across the country seemingly to avoid the family. Skyla settles into marriage and motherhood, but quiet life in small-town Wisconsin can’t quell feelings of restlessness. Then into her life comes Madame Picard, the local psychic from the disreputable bookstore, Mystic Books, and new neighbor, Roxanne, whose goal in life is to have twelve kids even though she can’t manage the five she has. Despite her family’s objections, Skyla befriends Roxanne and gets a job at the bookstore, and life gets fuller and more complicated than she ever imagined. Exceptionally heartwarming and inevitably bittersweet, A Scattered Life is a story that will stay with the reader long after the last page is read.

    Now the New York Times bestselling author delivers a poignant, funny, and irresistibly sensual novel about one night in the life of a man and a woman that will change their future forever.Television producer Brin Cassidy was throwing the biggest dinner party of her life. And with everything in utter chaos, who should show up unannounced on her doorstep but her handsome estranged husband, Jon Riley.Brin had not only worked with the popular star of Riley in the Morning, she had fallen in love with and married him. She knew she owed Riley an explanation for why she walked out. But did he have to come on this of all nights?Temperamental, charismatic, and devastatingly blue-eyed, Riley was a man who knew what he wanted, and he wasn’t leaving until he got it. But the sensuous and strong-willed beauty he still called his wife was every bit his match.From dusk until dawn the two will experience a second honeymoon of passion, seduction, and deep revelation that will determine if there is any future for Riley in the morning.