They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family's orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Yet, as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts' influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation.Full of heartbreak and hilarity, French Braid is classic Anne Tyler: a stirring, uncannily insightful novel of tremendous warmth and humor that illuminates the kindnesses and cruelties of our daily lives, the impossibility of breaking free from those who love us, and how close--yet how unknowable--every family is to itself.

    Bessie is a confident sixteen-year-old girl with the world at her feet, dreaming of what life will bring and what she’ll bring to this life. Then everything comes crashing down. Her bright and trusting smile is lost, banished by shame—and a secret she’ll carry with her for the rest of her life.2021. The last thirty-seven years have not been easy for Bess. At fifty-three she is visibly weary, and her marriage to Mario is in tatters. Watching her son in newlywed bliss—the hope, the trust, the joy—Bess knows it is time to face her own demons, and try to save her relationship. But she’ll have to throw off the burden of shame if she is to honour that sixteen-year-old girl whose dreams lie frozen in time.Can Bess face her past, finally come clean to Mario, and claim the love she has longed to fully experience all these years?

    It was my time to serve our country, just like my father and my grandfather before me. The pain that throbbed in my chest every night I was away was the stone cold fact that I’d left her behind, not ever having told her how I felt. After twelve years and only a few short visits in-between, I’m finally back for good. I’ve waited long enough and I’m ready to take back the girl I let get away all those years ago.Finding out he was back in town isn’t too shocking, but finding out he’s back permanently - that’s a whole different story. He’s been my unicorn for as long as I can remember and the more I think about seeing him, the more I want to run and hide. Twelve years is a long time to live without someone in your life, we’ve both grown up and I doubt he’ll remember the little girl his brother dumped in middle school. Now that he’s back how do I hide the feelings of desire and heartbreak that he left me with all those years ago.

    While Ty manages their herd of dairy cows, Betsy busies herself with the farm’s day-to-day operations and tries to forget her dream of motherhood. But when her free-spirited sister, Jenna, drops off her two young daughters for “just two weeks,” Betsy’s carefully constructed wall of self-protection begins to crumble.As the two weeks stretch deeper into the Alabama summer, Betsy and Ty learn to navigate the new additions in their world—and revel in the laughter that now fills their home. Meanwhile, record temperatures promise to usher in the most active hurricane season in decades.Attending an art retreat four hundred miles away, Jenna is fighting her own battles. She finally has time and energy to focus on her photography, a lifelong ambition. But she wonders how her rediscovered passion can fit in with the life she’s made back home as a single mom.When Hurricane Ingrid aims a steady eye at the Alabama coast, Jenna must make a decision that will change her family’s future, even as Betsy and Ty try to protect their beloved farm and their hearts. Hurricane Season is the story of one family’s unconventional journey to healing—and the relationships that must be mended along the way.“A story both powerful and enchanting: a don’t-miss novel in the greatest Southern traditions of storytelling.” —Patti Callahan Henry, New York Times bestselling author for The Hideaway

    She’s moved to another country and got a new job, a new home, a brand new life. . .But when she discovers a box of unread love letters in the bottom of her wardrobe, all ending with the words ‘please forgive me’, she finds herself drawn to the mystery behind them.Can the unravelling of another person’s story help Leonie deal with her own past and her own secrets? All she knows is that she has to try. Because if the couple behind the love letters had a happy ending, then perhaps she just might too.

    It's all the things we all hold onto, all the things we let anchor onto us, and all the things that leave us vacant.

    Two government-sponsored documentarians from Cincinnati, Ohio—a writer and photographer—are dispatched to penetrate this wilderness and record what they find for President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration.For photographer Clay Havens, the assignment is his last chance to reboot his flagging career. So when he and his journalist partner are warned away from the remote Spooklight Holler outside of town, they set off eagerly in search of a headline story.What they see will haunt Clay into his old age: Jubilee Buford, a woman whose skin is a shocking and unmistakable shade of blue. From this happenstance meeting between a woman isolated from society and persecuted her whole life, and a man accustomed to keeping himself at lens distance from others, comes a mesmerizing story in which the dark shades of betrayal, prejudice, fear, and guilt, are refracted along with the incandescent hues of passion and courage.Panning across the rich rural aesthetic of eastern Kentucky, The Last Blue is a captivating love story and an intimate portrait of what it is like to be truly one of a kind.

    Faced with the absence of her brother, who's serving life in San Quentin, and hardened by her own experiences in lock-up, Mel sturggles to adjust to the harsh realities of life on the outside. She quickly discovers that freeedom is relative...she has no money, no prospects, no guidance. Forced to return to her mother's apartment in Marin County and take a job houling portable toilets, Mel finds herself drinking too much and hanging out with her old gang again. Haunted by glimpses of her own harrowing girlhood and of the mysterious circumstances that put her in prison in the first place, she slowly, bravely begins to forge a potential path toward redemption and escape.

    He had written off love after losing his wife years ago. A chance meeting changes these two lives forever.JOURNEY OF GRACE is book one of the tightly woven Christian romance series entitled JOURNEY OF LOVE by T.K. Chapin. Follow the lives of three grown siblings as they face challenges of faith, love, and heartache. The JOURNEY OF LOVE series is a spin-off of the best-selling DIAMOND LAKE SERIES. When Grace Anderson left Newport, Washington, she thought it was for good. But now she's back and trying to start a new life after running away from her abusive husband. Even surrounded by the love of her family, she can't help but cling to the pieces of her past that hurt the most.Owen McBride never dreamed of finding love again after losing his wife. The dashing Newport High School history teacher had written off love and was solely focused on living a life devoted to God and teaching children. That is, until he met Grace Anderson.Will these two find love in each other's arms? Or will God's will be something completely different?From the best-selling Christian Romance author T.K. Chapin comes a love story that will keep you reading until the very last page. Heartfelt, inspirational, and clean, Journey of Grace will remind you how God can work in the lives of those who place their trust in Him.

    In fact, there are times she can’t even manage to stay inside it. Junior year is off to a less than stellar start for Sylvie: Her parents are splitting up, her little brother is sitting at her lunch table, and she’s the target of the school bully. Plus, she accidentally astral projects, slipping out of her body again and again at all the worst times. Sylvie is cast as the class freak and a medical misfit. She wishes she were somewhere else. Someone else. But it's only when her best friend catches the attention of the boy Sylvie's loved in secret since the fifth grade that Sylvie makes up her mind to do something drastic. Sylvie intends to get Kevin by any means possible -- even if it involves treachery, deceit, and the dark side of the paranormal. After years of trying to ignore her ability to astral project, Sylvie finally decides to embrace it. But she also decides to embrace the shadows that accompany her on her out-of-body experiences. Opening herself up to the shadows and their evil, Sylvie comes up with a malicious plan. She is positive her scheme will give her what she wants, but she doesn’t count on it all spiraling out of control.Untethered by Katie Hayoz explores the intoxicating and dangerous world of jealousy and obsession when coupled with paranormal ability. It is a touching, sometimes funny, sometimes heart-breaking novel that speaks to the self-doubt lurking in us all. ****Indie B.R.A.G. Medallion ***Runner up in the Mslexia Children's and YA Novel Competition.

    We come to know and love this girl, called Small Bird by her family, through the events of her colorful childhood and her marriage to Tutankhaten, a boy of royal birth. Her efforts to save the kingdom from conniving priests and soldiers were gallant and dramatic.While the fate of the Queen is unknown, in her story Lucile Morrison ventures to suppose a satisfying ending to the romance. An extraordinarily accurate, vivid picture of domestic and court life which will enrich any study of the culture of ancient Egypt.Illustrations by Franz Geritz, done in the style of ancient Egypt, help set the mood of Ankhsen­amon's story as the clock is turned back more than three thousand years. Color frontispiece and newly recolored map end pages.

    When an ATV accident leaves her teenage son in a wheelchair, she loses her carefully constructed self-control.In the after-gloom of her dreaded fiftieth birthday and the discovery of her husband’s infidelity, Jackie realizes she must reconnect with her former self to find the happiness she needs to move forward.Faith lacks the courage to stand up to her abusive husband. She turns to her sisters for help, placing all their lives at risk.In the midst of their individual challenges, the Sweeney sisters must cope with their mother’s mental decline. Is Lovie in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, or is her odd behavior normal for a woman her age? No one, including Lovie, understands her obsession with a rusty key she wears around her neck.For fans of Elin Hildebrand, Her Sister’s Shoes is a contemporary women’s novel that explores and proves the healing power of family.

    There have been no leads, no arrests, no witnesses. The only suspect was quiet, middle-aged Leland Ernest.And Grace Wright has just bought the house next door. Recently divorced, Grace uprooted her two small children to start again and hopes the move will reset her crippling insomnia. But now she understands bargain-price for her beautiful new house.With whispered neighbourhood gossip and increasingly sleepless nights, Grace develops a fierce obsession with Leland and the safety of her children. Could she really be living next door to a child-kidnapper? A murderer?With reality and dream blurring more each day, Grace desperately pursues the truth - following Ava's family, demanding answers from the police - and then a body is discovered...

    Minae is a Japanese expatriate graduate student who has lived in the United States for two decades but turned her back on the English language and American culture. After a phone call from her older sister reminds her that it is the twentieth anniversary of their family's arrival in New York, she spends the day reflecting in solitude and over the phone with her sister about their life in the United States, trying to break the news that she has decided to go back to Japan and become a writer in her mother tongue.Published in 1995, this formally daring novel radically broke with Japanese literary tradition. It liberally incorporated English words and phrases, and the entire text was printed horizontally, to be read from left to right, rather than vertically and from right to left. In a luminous meditation on how a person becomes a writer, Mizumura transforms the "I-novel," a Japanese confessional genre that toys with fictionalization. An I-Novel tells the story of two sisters while taking up urgent questions of identity, race, and language. Above all, it considers what it means to write in the era of the hegemony of English--and what it means to be a writer of Japanese in particular. Juliet Winters Carpenter masterfully renders a novel that once appeared untranslatable into English.

    But can the dead help her remember why she’s still alive? When You Are Lost… Emma Graves was only eight years old when a tragic school bus accident shattered the rural community where she grew up. When the bus was discovered the driver was dead and Emma, her older sister and her sister’s best friend were missing. A frantic search through the cold, dark woods in the surrounding area began. As the sun rose the next morning, a cold and terrified Emma was found. Emma remembered little else beyond watching through the fractured windshield as her sister and her friend walked away from the bus to find help. Spring turned into summer and then to fall and the missing girls never came back. When You Come Back… Twenty-five years later Emma is all grown up. Though she is an acclaimed forensic anthropologist, her personal life is a different matter. After surviving another tragic accident, this one at a dig, Emma needs to hide somewhere and pull herself together again. After all, she has been fractured since she was eight years old, this breakdown has been coming for a long time. Going home is her only choice. The last thing she expected to find on her return was two more young girls missing. The small town is torn apart all over again. With Emma back, attention turns to her. What is she hiding? Why can’t she remember what really happened that day twenty-five years ago? Why is she back in town now and two more children are missing? When human remains are found deep in a cave that requires Emma’s expertise in retrieving them, the truth may just be more than anyone bargained for.