Book picks similar to
Beaming Sonny Home by Cathie Pelletier
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The Bar Harbor Retirement Home for Famous Writers (And Their Muses)
Terri-Lynne DeFino - 2018
But now he's come to the Bar Harbor Home for the Elderly to spend the remainder of his days among kindred spirits: the publishing industry's nearly gone but never forgotten greats. Only now, at the end of his life, does he comprehend the price of appeasing every desire, and the consequences of forsaking love to pursue greatness. For Alfonse has an unshakeable case of writer's block that distresses him much more than his precarious health.Set on the water in one of New England's most beautiful locales, the Bar Harbor Home was established specifically for elderly writers needing a place to live out their golden years—or final days—in understated luxury and surrounded by congenial literary company. A faithful staff of nurses and orderlies surround the writers, and are drawn into their orbit, as they are forced to reckon with their own life stories. Among them are Cecibel Bringer, a young woman who knows first-hand the cost of chasing excess. A terrible accident destroyed her face and her sister in a split-second decision that Cecibel can never forgive, though she has tried to forget. Living quietly as an orderly, refusing to risk again the cost of love, Cecibel never anticipated the impact of meeting her favorite writer, Alfonse Carducci—or the effect he would have on her existence. In Cecibel, Alfonse finds a muse who returns him to the passion he thought he lost. As the words flow from him, weaving a tale taken up by the other residents of the Pen, Cecibel is reawakened to the idea of love and forgiveness.As the edges between story and reality blur, a world within a world is created. It’s a place where the old are made young, the damaged are made whole, and anything is possible…
McIntyre Security Bodyguard Series - Box Set 4
April Wilson - 2021
She doesn't remember any of it, but she has the bruises and lacerations all over her body as painful reminders of something she just wants to put behind her. The problem is, she can’t move on. Everything she’d ever hoped for was torn away from her that night. The man she’s been crushing on has vowed to restore her sense of safety and security. He’ll stop at nothing to catch the assailant who hurt her. The tragic irony is, now he wants her in his life. But it’s too late now.Mack Donovan has always kept a careful distance from Erin. She’s sweet, beautiful, and innocent - way too young and too good for him. After a career in the military and a stint as a mercenary, he’s done things he's not proud of. He thinks his hands are too dirty to touch her. When he rejects her invitation to attend a New Year’s Eve party, the unthinkable happens. A sexual predator drugs Erin and steals not just her innocence, but her sense of self. Mack will stop at nothing to find him and end him. In the meanwhile, he’s not giving up on Erin. He will show her that not all men are monsters.With This RingAnnie is marrying her best friend today, the love of her life. She's waited years for this day, and she's not going to let anything get in the way. So what if she's nine months pregnant with twins and starting to feel contractions? She only has to make it until the ceremony is done. What could possibly go wrong? As a follow-up novella to Annie and Jake's second chance romance (Redeemed), WITH THIS RING is a heart-warming look at love, romance, family, and childbirth.Collateral DamageWhen Sophie McIntyre's blind date goes horribly wrong, she finds herself running for her life. Dominic Zaretti is a man who gets things done—one who doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty in the process. His job is to disappear with Sophie and keep her alive until the threat is neutralized. But when Dominic falls for the curvy, statuesque beauty, he finds himself making the ultimate sacrifice to keep her safe.
Rocket City
Cathryn Alpert - 1995
Reminiscent of such modern classics as Cowboys Are My Weakness and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, with a touch of Geek Love thrown in for good measure, Rocket City is a deliciously original and strangely moving novel of alienation in America's Southwest.
A Short Gentleman
Jon Canter - 2008
He struggles to come to terms with the forces that brought him down.
An American Tune
Barbara Shoup - 2012
Not even her husband knows that back in the ‘60s she was Jane Barth, a student deeply involved in the antiwar movement. An American Tune moves back and forth in time, telling the story of Jane, a girl from a working-class family who fled town after she was complicit in a deadly bombing, and Nora, the woman she became, a wife and mother living a quiet life in northern Michigan. An achingly poignant account of a family crushed under the weight of suppressed truths, An American Tune illuminates the irrevocability of our choices and how those choices come to compose the tune of our lives.
The Sisters Café
Carolyn Brown - 2013
She's taken step one and gotten engaged to a reliable man, but she's beginning to question their relationship. Does he really love her, or is she just arm candy for his political career? Why is her future mother-in-law getting increasingly hostile? Worse, why does he stand up for his mother when she says those awful things, instead of protecting her? Cathy is full of self-doubt. Both of her options—going through with the wedding or breaking off her engagement—are beginning to look like a nightmare either way. She knows her friends will back her up, but she's the one who has to make a decision that's going to tear her apart.
The Piano Man's Daughter
Timothy Findley - 1995
Lily is a woman pursued by her own demons, "making off with the matches just when the fires caught hold," "a beautiful, mad genius, first introduced to us singing in her mother's belly." It is also the tale of people who dream in songs, two Irish immigrant families facing a new and uncertain future in turn-of-the-century Toronto. Finally, it is a richly detailed tribute to a golden epoch in our history and of a generation striking the last, haunting chord of innocence.The Piano Man's Daughter is a symphony of wonderful storytelling, unforgettable characters, and a lilting, lingering melody that plays on long after the last page has been turned.
When life gives you lulu lemons
Lauren Weisburger
Emily, now in her 30s, is living in Los Angeles with a husband and a career as an image consultant—a career that is suddenly floundering—when she gets a desperate summons to Greenwich, Connecticut, from her old friend Miriam. Miriam’s pal Karolina is all over the media with a bogus drunk driving change, and this senator’s wife and former Victoria’s Secret model needs an image makeover, fast. The narrative is split between the three women as they uncover a major betrayal and in doing so form an enviable bond. The doings of the Greenwich housewives who are now shunning Karolina is uproariously funny, and even jaded Emily is shocked by the scandalous behavior going on behind oversized doors. It feels like Weisberger wrote her novel yesterday, peppering the story with real-life celebrity misconduct. When Life Gives You Lululemons is a laugh-out-loud funny look at rich people behaving badly and the steel bonds of true female friendship. —Seira Wilson, Amazon Book Review
I Don't Know How She Does It
Allison Pearson - 2001
But when she finds herself awake at 1:37 a.m. in a panic over the need to produce a homemade pie for her daughter's school, she has to admit her life has become unrecognizable. With panache, wisdom, and uproarious wit, I Don't Know How She Does It brilliantly dramatizes the dilemma of every working mom.
The Book of Bright Ideas
Sandra Kring - 2006
Evelyn “Button” Peters is nine the summer Winnalee and her fiery-spirited older sister, Freeda, blow into her small town–and from the moment she sees them, Button knows this will be a summer unlike any other.Much to her mother’s dismay, Button is fascinated by the Malone sisters, especially Winnalee, a feisty scrap of a thing who carries around a shiny silver urn containing her mother’s ashes and a tome she calls “The Book of Bright Ideas.” It is here, Winnalee tells Button, that she records everything she learns: her answers to the mysteries of life. But sometimes those mysteries conceal a truth better left buried. And when a devastating secret is suddenly revealed, dividing loyalties and uprooting lives, no one–from Winnalee and her sister to Button and her family–will ever be the same.
Shit Happens
Eileen Wharton - 2012
She's got problems though when bits of her ex-husband turn up in different places and the slimy DI Savage seems to be bending the evidence to link her to the death. Add the fact that she's being pressured into taking a ‘job’ by hard-nosed Vera Devlin from the estate and having to work in a topless bar to make ends meet and you can see she's up against it. Desperate to extricate herself from the mess she breaks into her old marital home to find the diary of her dead husband, except that his mother has taken up residence and arrives back early from bingo… Set against a backdrop of Northern council estate life, this fast paced, humorous novel exemplifies the problems caused by poverty, piles and unruly children, think Jeremy Kyle meets the Thorn Birds and you won't be far wrong!
No Sweat Pants Allowed - Wine Club
Jan Romes - 2015
They quickly become friends and form the No Sweat Pants Allowed - Wine Club. This newly found alliance brings about some humorous escapades, a few tears, and a bond so strong no man can break as they try to cling to the past and finally step out of their comfort zones to find a happiness they thought they'd never feel again. Discover Elaina Samuels, Tawny Westerfield, Stephanie Mathews, and Grace Cordray.
Fortune's Bastard
Robert Chalmers - 2004
He wears his temper like a badge of honor, would rather step over a homeless beggar than walk around him, and engages in petty warfare with his staff over expense receipts. He's also never been much bothered with monogamy, but when one morning he spontaneously seduces his temp in an office storeroom, he's definitely crossed a line in blatancy. Miller has made few friends and many enemies—not to mention the fact that the storeroom is a notorious trysting place and he and the temp both emerge covered in dust and airmail stickers—so the news doesn’t take long to reach his cold, beautiful wife. Conveniently, it just happens to be their anniversary. Imagine the celebratory dinner, capped by her returning her house keys and consummating her desire to sleep with the neighbor.Not a man to suffer rejection well, Miller heads for a London media hangout, where two employees introduce him to cocaine. By morning, his exploits are public (a photographer captured him snorting the cocaine in public), his career is over (thanks to a damning interview he gave a journalist from a rival paper), he's not only painted the word 'WANKER' on the cuckolding neighbor's car, but misspelled it, and his house is on fire (never leave a goodbye bonfire of wedding photos unattended). . . . Clearly, it’s time to leave town. Miller has an engagement to speak to the boys at his old prep school, but he can't seem to stop pouring gasoline on the fire that his life has become, showing up hungover after a night partying with an old school friend and a gaggle of Spanish flight attendants, and calling the headmaster by his behind-the-back nickname of "Stiffo" to the students, for a start. After the speech, he speaks with his doctor and learns that his father-in-law plans to kill him.Leigh, the old school friend, works for an English language school in Barcelona, and Miller wrangles its address out of him, for he clearly can't go home. He gets the job and adapts surprisingly well to a life of an underpaid teacher, despite the fact that some of his students will clearly never learn the language (there are hilarious scenes of their attempts in this section) and even starts up a romance with a tough-talking English girl who's one of his fellow teachers—but he doesn't tell her who he really is when he has the opportunity, and when she figures it out on her own she is livid and that bridge is burnt. To make matters worse, his father-in-law's goons have tracked him down.Miller flees again, winding up in Florida, in a town populated by ex-circus freaks and presided over by the Half Man, a criminal and sadist with no legs who welcomes Miller to town by shoving a gun barrel in his mouth and breaking his teeth. But ironically, it seems that despite the fleas in his trailer, the one-eyed albino hit man who seems to overhear every compromising conversation between Miller and the Half Man’s beautiful wife the Lizard Woman, and the fact that the Half Man’s stranglehold on the local police mean that Miller isn’t actually free to leave, it seems that Miller somehow belongs among the freaks. These misfits—among them a black dwarf, a gay clown with a penchant for altar boys, a heroin addict who is their unlicensed doctor, a biker hit man named Hollis after Grove’s erstwhile publicist, and the Lizard Woman’s wonderful eight-year-old daughter—unwittingly teach Miller what normal life never could—how to love, and how to stand up for something he truly believes in. When Miller's wife tracks him down and has him sign over the spoils of his old life to her, he gets enough money out of her to hire the albino to hit the Half Man. And though all certainly does not go smoothly with the hit—someone as vicious as the Half Man is unlikely to go quietly—Miller and the Lizard Woman are able to close that chapter and start a new life together.
The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt
Burt Solomon - 2019
TR was thrown clear but his Secret Service bodyguard was killed instantly. The trolley's motorman pleaded guilty to manslaughter and the matter was quietly put to rest.But was it an accident or an assassination attempt...and would there be another "accident" soon?The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt casts this event in a darker light. John Hay, the Secretary of State, finds himself in pursuit of a would-be assassin, investigating the motives of TR's many enemies, including political rivals and the industrial trusts. He crosses paths with luminaries of the day, such as best-pal Henry Adams, Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Mark Hanna, and (as an investigatory sidekick) the infamous Nellie Bly, who will help Hay protect the man who wants to transform a nation.
Cricket Kings
William McInnes - 2006
With these characters William will make us laugh and cry. And never again will we think that someone is just a regular bloke - everyone can be a king or a queen in their own suburb.