In that book, Reyna recounted the pain and poverty she experienced growing up in Mexico without her parents, who had immigrated to the U.S. years earlier. When she was nine years old, Reyna made her own journey across the U.S.–Mexico border in search of a home. What she found instead was an indifferent mother, an abusive, alcoholic father, and a school system that didn’t honor her heritage. Against all obstacles, Reyna’s love of reading and writing propelled her to rise above all challenges and ultimately be accepted to the University of California, Santa Cruz.A Dream Called Home tells the story of Reyna’s pursuit to become the first in her family to earn a college degree and to find her place and a home in her adoptive country. At UC, Santa Cruz and on her own for the first time, Reyna faces new struggles and learns to forge ahead toward her dreams despite the alienation and estrangement from her family and her new community. Back in Los Angeles after graduation, Reyna attempts to parlay her creative writing degree into a full-time job only to discover she knows nothing about the publishing business. Through it all, Reyna holds fast to her dreams and makes the impossible possible—she goes from being an undocumented immigrant to an award-winning author. Reyna details the arduous journey of pursuing her dream of becoming a writer and finding that one thing she has desperately longed for ever since her parents left her behind in Mexico—a home.This is an inspiring account of one young woman’s quest to find her place in America as a first-generation university student, a Latina, and a writer determined to change the course of her family forever. Reyna’s story mirrors the journey that millions of immigrants have taken as she creates her own path toward a better life for herself on her own terms.

    But underneath the gleaming mid-century house, the flawless hostess mom, and the thriving businessman dad ran an unspoken tension that, amid the upheaval of the late 1960s, was destined to fracture their precarious facade.His older sister Donna introduces him to the charismatic Valentine, who places a tab of acid on twelve-year-old Rush's tongue, proclaiming: "This is sacrament. You are one of us now."After an unceremonious ejection from an experimental art school, Rush heads to Tuscon to make a major drug purchase and, still barely a teenager, disappears into the nascent American counterculture. Stitching together a ragged assemblage of lowlifes, prophets, and fellow wanderers, he seeks kinship in the communes of the west. His adolescence is spent looking for knowledge, for the divine, for home. Given what Rush confronts on his travels--from ordinary heartbreak to unimaginable violence--it is a miracle he is still alive.The Light Years is a prayer for vanished friends, an odyssey signposted with broken and extraordinary people. It transcends one boy's story to perfectly illustrate the slow slide from the optimism of the 1960s into the darker and more sinister 1970s. This is a riveting, heart-stopping journey of discovery and reconciliation, as Rush faces his lost childhood and, finally, himself.

    Eve rarely spoke about her childhood and it was difficult to imagine her living anywhere else except Manhattan, where she could be found attending Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera or inspecting a round of French triple crème at Zabar’s. After her mother passed, Julie discovered a keepsake book filled with farewell notes from friends and relatives addressed to a ten-year-old girl named Eva. This long-hidden memento was the first clue to the secret pain that Julie’s mother had carried as a refugee and immigrant from Nazi-occupied Vienna, shining a light on “a story of political repression, terror, and dissolution...full of astonishing and unlikely twists of fate showing again that individual destiny may be the greatest mystery of all” (Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance). “A gripping and intimate wartime account with piercing contemporary relevance” (Kirkus Reviews), Eva and Eve lyrically traces one woman’s search for her mother’s lost childhood while revealing the resilience of our forebears and the sacrifices that ordinary people are called to make during history’s darkest hours.

    Worth intersection waiting for the light to change when he hears the roar of a truck engine speeding toward him. Before he can react, his motorcycle is crushed, and he is thrown fifty feet onto the median.At that precise moment in Dallas, Elizabeth’s sleep is interrupted by a vivid dream in which she witnesses James' accident. As she watches him begin to pass from life to death, she extends her hand and cries, “Don’t die if you don’t know Jesus!”Although neither James nor Elizabeth is aware of the existence of the other, they begin a ten-year odyssey in which their lives are inexorably intertwined, changing their futures and the futures of those they love most. The Warrior is a moving testimony to the power of prayer and God’s desire to redeem every life.

    You renders the singular arc of a woman’s life through letters Mary-Louise Parker composes to the men, real and hypothetical, who have informed the person she is today. Beginning with the grandfather she never knew, the letters range from a missive to the beloved priest from her childhood to remembrances of former lovers to an homage to a firefighter she encountered to a heartfelt communication with the uncle of the infant daughter she adopted. Readers will be amazed by the depth and style of these letters, which reveal the complexity and power to be found in relationships both loving and fraught.

    We are all your mothers. Isn't that better than just having one?" An ordinary weekend becomes surreal when Celena's mother, whom she has not seen for years, returns to claim her. Told that she is going to visit a place called Synanon, six-year-old Celena leaves her native Los Angeles on a bus for a secluded ranch setting in Northern California where the residents are strangely bald and dressed uniformly in overalls. Coming to realize this eerie institution is to be her new home, Celena is ultimately forced to develop a new strength of being to protect herself against the abusive school demonstrators, the troubled children, and the chilling thought that she and her mother might never leave. C.A. Wittman's daring memoir is a coming-of-age story about growing up in a cult, the unconditional love between a mother and daughter, and how that love helped a young girl to grow and flourish against the odds of her distorted childhood.

    In January's case, she is hallucinating 95 percent of the time that she is awake. Potent psychiatric drugs that would level most adults barely faze her. January, "Jani" to her family, has literally hundreds of imaginary friends. They go by names like 400-the-Cat, 100 Degrees, and 24 Hours and live on an island called "Calalini," which she describes as existing "on the border of my world and your world." Some of these friends are good, and some of them, such as 400, are very bad. They tell her to jump off buildings, attack her brother, and scream at strangers.In the middle of these never-ending delusions, hallucinations, and paroxysms of rage are Jani's parents, who have gone to the ends of the earth to keep both of their children alive and unharmed. They live in separate one-bedroom apartments in order to keep her little brother, Bohdi, safe from his big sister—and wage a daily war against a social system that has all but completely failed them. January First is the story of the daily struggles and challenges they face as they do everything they can to help their daughter while trying to keep their family together. It is the inspiring tale of their resolute determination and faith.

    Set during the mid-1800s in the vast grainfields of Russia, Who Is to Blame? follows the lives of two star-crossed serfs, Elizaveta and Feodor, torn apart by their own families and the Church while simultaneously trapped in the inhumane life of poverty to which they were born.At the other end of the spectrum, Count Maximov and his family struggle to maintain harmony amidst a tapestry of deception and debauchery woven by the Count’s son. The plot twists further when the Tsar emancipates twenty million serfs from bondage as the rural gentry’s life of privilege and carelessness takes its final bow, and much of Russia’s nobility faces possible financial ruin.

    What she finds is a hippie dippy awareness of who she really is. Of who we all are.A humorous and relatable memoir on spiritual awakening, Hippie Dippy Bulls**t is for those who are spiritually curious, are on the cusp of awakening, or who are already woke. It delves into concepts such as reincarnation, soulmates, synchronicities, and the Law of Attraction ... while always allowing, and encouraging, the reader decide their own truths.* Please note: Third-party, used copies are not the latest, updated version of this book.

    Her five older siblings were taken into care many years ago. So no one can understand why she was left at home to suffer for so long. It seems Aimee was forgotten.The social services are looking for a very experienced foster carer to look after Aimee and, when she reads the referral, Cathy understands why. Despite her reservations, Cathy agrees to Aimee on – there is something about her that reminds Cathy of Jodie (the subject of ‘Damaged’ and the most disturbed child Cathy has cared for), and reading the report instantly tugs at her heart strings.When she arrives, Aimee is angry. And she has every right to be. She has spent the first eight years of her life living with her drug-dependent mother in a flat that the social worker described as ‘not fit for human habitation’. Aimee is so grateful as she snuggles into her bed at Cathy’s house on the first night that it brings Cathy to tears.Aimee’s aggressive mother is constantly causing trouble at contact, and makes sweeping allegations against Cathy and her family in front of her daughter as well. It is a trying time for Cathy, and it makes it difficult for Aimee to settle. But as Aimee begins to trust Cathy, she starts to open up. And the more Cathy learns about Aimee’s life before she came into care, the more horrified she becomes.It’s clear that Aimee should have been rescued much sooner and as her journey seems to be coming to a happy end, Cathy can’t help but reflect on all the other ‘forgotten children’ that are still suffering…

    At first, it was a typical whirlwind romance. But one day Bledi told her that love always comes at a price ...Bledi tricked Sophie into travelling to Italy, where he forced her to sell her body to help him pay off a debt. Terrified and ashamed, Sophie worked the dangerous Italian streets without rest, seeing as many as 30 clients in a night. She was completely at Bledi′s mercy for food, clothes and shelter. And without money, friends or family, she was trapped.But Sophie found the strength to keep going, clinging to life by a single thread of hope: that somehow she′d find a way to escape.

    Then came Dry. Now, there's Lust & Wonder.In chronicling the development and demise of the different relationships he's had while living in New York, Augusten Burroughs examines what it means to be in love, what it means to be in lust, and what it means to be figuring it all out. With Augusten's unique and singular observations and his own unabashed way of detailing both the horrific and the humorous, Lust and Wonder is an intimate and honest memoir that his legions of fans have been waiting for.

    As Moody has put it, "this is a story in which a lot of bad luck is the daily fare of the protagonists, but in which they are also in love.” To Moody’s astonishment, matrimony turns out to be the site of strength in hard times, a vessel infinitely tougher and more durable than any boat these two participants would have traveled by alone. Love buoys the couple, lifting them above their hardships, and the reader is buoyed along with them.

    The final megalomaniac is dead. The universe stepped back from the edge of extinction. The intergalactic war between the forces of Good and Evil versus the rest of us is over. Fortunately the rest of us won. Welcome to the universe once we’ve conquered the urge to control everything or else blow it up. But even a universe at peace is still a very dangerous place. 22 years ago a spaceship crashed on Earth Seven. One of the boys that found the wreckage is on the cusp of uniting the planet under his rule. By convention, all planets in contact quarantine are called Earth and given a numerical designation. For example, if you are reading this on Amazon, you are on Earth Five. The war taught us that we can never let barbarians loose in the universe again. Earth Seven is thousands of years from joining the Federation. They are at a medieval level of development and have met none of the contact criteria. Allor heals the sick with alien technology and they love him for it. Allor promises to end the religious wars. His sister runs an informant network and collects the severed heads of his rivals. His mother has created a religion to worship him. Oh, dear. Koven Modi, a rookie field historian, is sent to investigate the use of advanced comms technology on Earth Seven, a Prim-3 planet. Koven is well-armed, well-trained and well-scared. War is constant on Earth Seven. His goals are simple. Don’t get killed and don’t get dumped by his girlfriend. Staying alive may be easier. Under other circumstances, Allor and Koven would be good friends. But their roles make them enemies. Calcus Majoris has deteremined that there is a 62.37% probability that Earth Five will self-destruct. Read Earth Seven before your planet blows up Your money back if your planet self-destructs before you read my book. Cursing: Yes Imaginary Sex: Yes Satirical Viewpoints: Overwhelmingly

    When her Estate discovered this never-before-published memoir in the attic of her home, it was an astonishing find. Before I Go is the definitive story of her life, in the author’s own candid words.While Cookson had authored previous autobiographies, none have truly touched upon the tragedy and personal anguish she experienced until now. For the first time, she reveals the worst years of her life—her constant battles with illness and a series of devastating miscarriages, the damaging jealousy of her friend and her struggle to be taken seriously as a writer. But what shines through most is her strength in the face of adversity, her deep love for her husband, Tom, the solace she found in her art and her unmistakable character. Before I Go is an inspiring story of resilience and a must for any Cookson fan.