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Secrets of Happiness
Joan Silber - 2021
In the aftermath of this revelation, Ethan's mother spends a year working abroad, returning much changed, and events introduce her to the other wife. Across town, Ethan's half brothers are caught in their own complicated journeys: one brother's penchant for minor delinquency has escalated, and the other must travel to Bangkok to bail him out, while the bargains their mother has struck about love and money continue to shape their lives.As Ethan finds himself caught in a love triangle of his own, the interwoven fates of these two households elegantly unfurl to encompass a woman rallying to help an ill brother with an unreliable lover and a filmmaker with a girlhood spent in Nepal. Evoking a generous and humane spirit, and a story that ranges over three continents, Secrets of Happiness elucidates the ways people marshal the resources at hand to forge their own forms of joy.
It Had to Be You
Ellie Adams - 2014
. . Could be the best thing that has ever happened to her.Lizzy Spellman has been dumped. At a party.While wearing a Henry VIII costume. By the man she thought was The One. Someone even filmed it, so now she's a massive YouTube hit sensation too.Just when she thinks things can't get any worse, she meets the rudest, most cynical man in the world, and gets a new mission in life. To prove him wrong.Love does exist, and she's going to find it . . .
Tin Angel
Kat Martin - 1989
Henry had been killed and left 51% of his businesses to his daughter, Jessica, and 49% to his manager, Jake Weston. Jessica lived in Boston and Jake thought she would remain there and let him run the business. But Jessica had other ideas. In their telegrams after Henry's death, Jessica and Jake antagonized each other and didn't like one another before they even met. Jake knew that Jessica was under the impression that the Tin Angel was a restaurant and didn't tell her otherwise. When she arrived and found it was a gambling and bawdy house, she almost died. Jessica thought that her 51% entitled her to run the businesses, including the Tin Angel and was angry when Jake didn't agree. So it started--two strong people trying to gain the advantage over the other, all the while fighting an attraction that grew stronger despite their efforts.
Raising Boys in the 21st Century
Steve Biddulph - 2018
But what kind of men? If you want your son to grow up open-hearted, kind, strong and full of life, then the job starts now. Baby, toddler, school child or teen – it’s all here. The most popular book ever about raising boys is back, significantly updated to help raise sons in a world that offers gender equality, respect and a whole new kind of man, but is still haunted by toxic masculinity. You’ll find cutting-edge science about the ‘physical fours’, the ‘emotional eights’ and how puberty can be turned into a positive time, along with hundreds of other practical tips for raising a son.No two boys are alike, and we have to get to know our own unique boy. The idea that ‘if we understand them, we can help them’ is what has made this book so well loved and trusted in over a million homes.As one of Australia's best-known psychologists for almost 30 years, Steve has introduced a generation of fathers into hands-on engagement with kids, and helped thousands of mothers gain confidence in their ability to raise sons well. He has worked with schools in 17 countries, and 130,000 parents have heard his unforgettable live talks.
Roseanne: My Life as a Woman
Roseanne Barr - 1989
Roseanne is the dramatic American saga, funny and true, of a woman who started with nothing, overcame great diversity, and with the strength of her convictions--and a brilliant wit--triumphed.#Harper & Row.
C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity: A Biography
George M. Marsden - 2016
S. Lewis's eloquent and winsome defense of the Christian faith, originated as a series of BBC radio talks broadcast during the dark days of World War Two. Here is the story of the extraordinary life and afterlife of this influential and much-beloved book.George Marsden describes how Lewis gradually went from being an atheist to a committed Anglican—famously converting to Christianity in 1931 after conversing into the night with his friends J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson—and how Lewis delivered his wartime talks to a traumatized British nation in the midst of an all-out war for survival. Marsden recounts how versions of those talks were collected together in 1952 under the title Mere Christianity, and how the book went on to become one of the most widely read presentations of essential Christianity ever published, particularly among American evangelicals. He examines its role in the conversion experiences of such figures as Charles Colson, who read the book while facing arrest for his role in the Watergate scandal. Marsden explores its relationship with Lewis's Narnia books and other writings, and explains why Lewis's plainspoken case for Christianity continues to have its critics and ardent admirers to this day.With uncommon clarity and grace, Marsden provides invaluable new insights into this modern spiritual classic.
The God of Pain's Groom
DemonicBlackCat
The Clandors have always bred beautiful females: they’re pale-skinned, golden haired, and mild-mannered.That is, until one day, Forrest Clandor refuses to be wedded and attend a typical high school house party instead. Fortunately, her twin brother River Clandor is up for the task. He pretends to be Forrest and step up to ‘marry’ Khaol. He doesn’t believe that the whole thing is real, until Khaol really does show up and accepts him as his groom.Can River handle being married to a mercurial, short-tempered God? And how did his family end up in this situation anyway? Also, why doesn’t Khaol seem to mind that he just married a guy?
Goodbye, Dearest Holly: Ten Years On
Kevin Wells - 2005
On August 4 2002, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman disappeared. For the next thirteen days, their families, the police, and the local community searched for them, while the nation watched in horrified suspense.Holly was a talented ten-year-old girl. Her parents, Kevin and Nicola, were certain she would be the first member of their family to go to university. Almost two weeks after Holly and Jessica went missing, their bodies were found – dumped in a ditch and badly burned. Two days later, Ian Huntley was charged with their murders.In the terrible weeks that followed, Kevin started to make notes, fearful that he might forget important details. Goodbye, Dearest Holly tells the story of the nightmare that began on August 4th, from the moment it became clear that Holly and Jessica were missing, through the long investigation and its aftermath. An unflinching tale of surviving tragedy, Kevin’s diaries tell of battles with the media, police bureaucracy and the legal system. The book includes a gripping account of the trial and convictions of Huntley and Maxine Carr. Above all, Goodbye, Dearest Holly is a loving final act of fatherhood.In this updated edition of Kevin Wells’ best-selling book, which includes a new chapter, he tells how his family continue with their lives ten years on from Holly’s death. It is the moving and emotional story of one family’s battle to regain some semblance of normality.Praise for Goodbye, Dearest Holly:'A brutally honest account of what happens when innocence meets evil. Kevin Wells’ book is about a father’s love, a family’s loss and a nation’s horror. If you want to know the true story of Soham then read it.’ Mail on Sunday
Swearing Off Stars
Danielle Wong - 2017
Finally free from her overbearing Brooklyn parents, she finds a welcome sense of independence in British college life--and quickly falls for Scarlett Daniels, an aspiring actress and hardheaded protester. Scarlett introduces her to an exciting gender-equality movement, but when their secret love clashes with political uprising, their relationship is one of the casualties. Years later, Lia's only memories of Scarlett are obscured by the glossy billboards she sees advertising the actress's new films. But when a mysterious letter surfaces, she is immediately thrown back into their unsettled romance, and she crosses oceans and continents in her search for her former lover. Lia will stop at nothing to win Scarlett back--but ultimately, spread across time and place, she begins to realize that uncovering lost love might not be attainable after all.
Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church
Kara Powell - 2016
Based on groundbreaking research with over 250 of the nation's leading congregations, Growing Young provides a strategy any church can use to involve and retain teenagers and young adults. It profiles innovative churches that are engaging 15- to 29-year-olds and as a result are growing--spiritually, emotionally, missionally, and numerically. Packed with both research and practical ideas, Growing Young shows pastors and ministry leaders how to position their churches to engage younger generations in a way that breathes vitality, life, and energy into the whole church.Visit www.churchesgrowingyoung.org for more information.
The Devil's Larder
Jim Crace - 2001
Here are sixty-four short fictions of at times Joycean beauty - about schoolgirls hunting for razor clams in the strand; or searching for soup-stones to take out the fishiness of fish but to preserve the flavor of the sea; or about a mother and daughter tasting food in one another's mouth to see if people really do taste things differently--and at other times, of Mephistophelean mischief: about the woman who seasoned her food with the remains of her cremated cat, and later, her husband, only to hear a voice singing from her stomach (you can't swallow grief, she was advised); or the restaurant known as "The Air & Light," the place to be in this small coastal town that serves as the backdrop for Crace's gastronomic flights of fancy, but where no food or beverage is actually served, though a 12 percent surcharge is imposed just for just sitting there and being seen.Food for thought in the best sense of the term, The Devil's Larder is another delectable work of fiction by a 2001 winner of The National Book Critics Circle Award.
Fatal Majesty: A Novel of Mary, Queen of Scots
Reay Tannahill - 1998
Mingling a poet's passion with an historian's insight, Tannahill chronicles an era of easy violence, desperate actions, and the grand, often terrifying, designs of those who would dominate it.
Novena for Murder
Carol Anne O'Marie - 1984
Publishers Weekly calls the Sister Mary Helen Mysteries "refreshingly different". Once you meet this spry, clever sleuth, you'll want to make a habit of reading her adventures again and again.Sister Mary Helen isn't ready for retirement. Instead she's arrived at a San Francisco women's college to teach history and perhaps shake things up. An earthquake does that before she can, and amid the rubble lies a body. An "Act of God" is not responsible for the death, but rather murder. One of Sister Helen's fellow nuns begins a novena to St. Dismas, "the Good Thief" predicting the saint will reveal the murderer within nine days. Sure enough the police soon nab a suspect...but Sister Mary Helen believes it's the wrong man and begins her own pursuit of the killer. Her motive is justice...and her inspiration, simply divine.
The Family Roe: An American Story
Joshua Prager - 2021
Journalist Joshua Prager spent hundreds of hours with Norma, discovered her personal papers—a previously unseen trove—and witnessed her final moments. The Family Roe presents her life in full. Propelled by the crosscurrents of sex and religion, gender and class, it is a life that tells the story of abortion in America.Prager begins that story on the banks of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River where Norma was born, and where unplanned pregnancies upended generations of her forebears. A pregnancy then upended Norma’s life too, and the Dallas waitress became Jane Roe.Drawing on a decade of research, Prager reveals the woman behind the pseudonym, writing in novelistic detail of her unknown life from her time as a sex worker in Dallas, to her private thoughts on family and abortion, to her dealings with feminist and Christian leaders, to the three daughters she placed for adoption.Prager found those women, including the youngest—Baby Roe—now fifty years old. She shares her story in The Family Roe for the first time, from her tortured interactions with her birth mother, to her emotional first meeting with her sisters, to the burden that was uniquely hers from conception.The Family Roe abounds in such revelations—not only about Norma and her children but about the broader “family” connected to the case. Prager tells the stories of activists and bystanders alike whose lives intertwined with Roe. In particular, he introduces three figures as important as they are unknown: feminist lawyer Linda Coffee, who filed the original Texas lawsuit yet now lives in obscurity; Curtis Boyd, a former fundamentalist Christian, today a leading provider of third-trimester abortions; and Mildred Jefferson, the first black female Harvard Medical School graduate, who became a pro-life leader with great secrets.An epic work spanning fifty years of American history, The Family Roe will change the way you think about our enduring American divide: the right to choose or the right to life.
The Possibility of Fireflies
Dominique Paul - 2006
I think it's about midnight. I was busy reading up until an hour ago, but my eyes started to hurt from squinting. Now it's just me and the waiting.It's 1987 and fourteen-year-old Ellie Roma doesn't have much of a family. She lives with her mother, who has taken a break from parenting; and her older sister, Gwen, who is on her way to becoming a juvenile delinquent. Her father left them to start a new life.So Ellie spends a lot of time alone, especially at night, when all she has to keep her company are the fireflies that flicker in the summer air. Then one day a mysterious stranger enters her dark world. He is Leo, twenty-one, who is on his way to Hollywood to become a rock star. Ellie and Leo connect instantly, and Ellie hopes Leo will be the one to rescue her from her unhappy life. But instead, Leo teaches Ellie that no one can save you. You have to go after what you want. So one night -- one terrible, frightening, thrilling night -- that's exactly what Ellie decides to do. With a fresh perspective, first-time novelist Dominique Paul deftly weaves a family drama about chaos and dysfunction, with a young girl's journey of triumph. Full of humor and sorrow, heartbreak and hope, The Possibility of Fireflies is really a story that we all have to tell: the story of the summer we grew up.