Now the acclaimed author updates that classic with a new exploration of the truths and realities behind women’s lives. In the Name of Friendship dares to investigate how the women’s movement changed the lives of those it touched and what hurdles it left to cross.Set in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, this wise novel is a group portrait of four disparate women who forge life-altering friendships despite personalities that vary as greatly as their vocations and ages. The novel weaves together a series of family crises with the friendships that help the four women refashion their lives. Maddy, the seventy-six-year-old real estate agent and matriarch of the group, struggles with the gradual death of her angry and rebellious Vietnam-marked son; fifty-year-old Alicia fights to reconnect her gay son with her newly retired husband; seventy-year-old musician Emily strives to bridge the gap with her estranged niece right at the moment her composition career starts to finally bloom; and Jenny, the thirty-year-old painter and baby of the group, questions the life she has created with her successful painter husband and tries to decide if she wants more from life.With this unusual group of multi-generational ladies, French tells a truly rare tale about four women who accidentally come into each other’s lives and in the process form an enduring friendship. It is a story of supporting one another, of looking at the grim conflicts created by cultural expectations of women, and realizing you are not alone—truly a tale of continuing hope.

    A moving depiction of the transformative power of first love, Hamann’s first novel follows Eveline Auerbach from her high school years in East Hampton, New York, in the 1970s through her early adulthood in the moneyed, high-pressured Manhattan of the 1980s. Centering on Evie’s fragile relationship with her family and her thwarted love affair with Harrison Rourke, a professional boxer, the novel is both a love story and an exploration of the difficulty of finding one’s place in the world. As Evie surrenders to the dazzling emotional highs of love and the crippling loneliness of heartbreak, she strives to reconcile her identity with the constraints that all relationships—whether those familial or romantic, uplifting to the spirit or quietly detrimental—inherently place on us. Though she stumbles and strains against social conventions, Evie remains a strong yet sensitive observer of the world around her, often finding beauty and meaning in unexpected places. Newly edited and revised since its original publication, Anthropology of an American Girl is an extraordinary piece of writing, original in its vision and thrilling in its execution.

    It is a stunning work: a complex tapestry of family tensions, baseball, politics and religion, by turns hilariously funny and agonizingly sad. Highly inventive formally, the novel is mainly narrated by Kincaid Chance, the youngest son in a family of four boys and identical twin girls, the children of Hugh Chance, a discouraged minor-league ballplayer whose once-promising career was curtained by an industrial accident, and his wife Laura, an increasingly fanatical Seventh-Day Adventist. The plot traces the working-out of the family's fate from the beginning of the Eisenhower years through the traumas of Vietnam.

    A summer of green apple trees, mowed lawns, and new sneakers. Of half-burnt firecrackers, of gathering dandelions, of Grandma's belly-busting dinner. It was a summer of sorrows and marvels and gold-fuzzed bees. A magical, timeless summer in the life of a twelve-year-old boy named Douglas Spaulding—remembered forever by the incomparable Ray Bradbury.Woven into the novel are the following short stories: Illumination, Dandelion Wine, Summer in the Air, Season of Sitting, The Happiness Machine, The Night, The Lawns of Summer, Season of Disbelief, The Last--the Very Last, The Green Machine, The Trolley, Statues, The Window, The Swan, The Whole Town's Sleeping, Goodbye Grandma, The Tarot Witch, Hotter Than Summer, Dinner at Dawn, The Magical Kitchen, Green Wine for Dreaming.

    Left to her grandparents' care, longing for her elusive, glamorous mother and for a father she barely remembers, Isabel's agony erupts into perverse and dangerous rebellion. A compelling novel that lends new meaning to Freud's "family romance", "Thicker Than Water" brilliantly illuminates how fragile the line is between family love and the darker sides of passion.

    This beautifully written book will keep you up all night. There are plenty of clues and there are a lot of hints, but even when you put them all together, it will be close to impossible to puzzle your way to the ending. If you are looking for a book, you can't put down, then Governor's Road is just right for you. Excitement, frisky loving, a mystery of epic proportions and traditional southern pathos make this book a fun and rewarding read. The terrorized children of Governor’s Road grew up without resolution or closure to the most devastating event of their young lives. Their friend, a child their age, disappeared one afternoon and somehow, they never seem to learn what happened. Saddened parents decide to protect their children and the obvious fear recedes in the face of the calm that settles back over the neighborhood. But, fear never really disappears until it's confronted. As adults, JoBeth and Billy set out to discover what happened to little Petey Shiner. The answer brings them to conclusion that there is no perfect childhood, even in a perfect town in a perfect decade. Every town hides its secrets and puts on a good face, even at the expense of its residents. Along the way, JoBeth and Billy discover love and romance. Their kindling of love takes you to places you can only want to return to…and their future makes you happy. It’s their past that is so hard to reconcile. As well as a lot of fun, a dark mystery and hot southern romance, JoBeth and her friends also encounter the harsh reality of Alzheimer’s and aging. Sometimes, a loved one can be lost more than once. The malevolent specter of mental illness surfaces when the reader meets Lucius Sifer and begins to understand the unusual existence the boy leads. The ending is grim but satisfies that need everyone has for justice. The most humble people can achieve heroism without fanfare or acknowledgment. As always, enjoy your adventure into the south...and remember, thoughtful book reviews are welcomed with open arms. Please see Observations of a Transplanted Southern Belle for more of Laurie Byrne Smith's work.

    They live in Brooklyn and are friends and neighbours; but since Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple.This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the simplest decisions - what music you listen to, whether to speak to the kid in the seat next to you, whether to give up your lunch money - are laden with potential political, social and racial disaster. This is also the story of 1990s America, when nobody cared anymore.This is the story of what would happen if two teenaged boys obsessed with comic book heroes actually had superpowers: they would screw up their lives.

    192 pages.Evie Decker is a shy, slightly plump teenager, lonely and silent. But her quiet life is shattered when she hears the voice of Drumstrings Casey on the radio and becomes instantly attracted to him. She manages to meet him, bursting out of her lonely shell--and into the attentive gaze of the intangible man who becomes all too real....

    He doesn't exactly understand why, but he accepts it. His mother often seems too emotionally detached to care for him. Her latest boyfriend Dick takes cruel pleasure in mimicking the boy’s stuttering, and wants to live his life without "somebody else's kid" getting in the way. So it's no surprise when they pack his bags to send him away. It is a surprise when they send him alone.Ushered from his Stockton, California home, Sebastien must fend for himself and travel two thousand miles across the country to live with his grandmother and sister in Pennsylvania. Along the way, he learns that sometimes caring, guidance and understanding can come from some unlikely people.Marcus is a man who has been neglected more by society than his family. As a young black ex-con, he is not the epitome of the person most would pick as a chaperone for their child's cross country trip. Yet rather than be held apart by their differences, Marcus and Sebastien are drawn together by the things that make us all alike. As both guide and protector, Marcus imparts his own style of wisdom while showing Sebastien that, despite the darker side of the human condition, people can and do care for one another.Greyhound is the story of the journey taken by a young boy into manhood, and by the reader into his world. Like every trip, there are many stops along the way. But this journey differs in the way young Sebastien arrives at his destination.

    Set in a small, dusty Texas town, it introduces Jacy, Duane and Sonny, teenagers stumbling towards adulthood, discovering the beguiling mysteries of sex and the even more baffling mysteries of love.

    She sees the bricks he hurls at her head as tokens of love, and each day Ignatz arranges a cunningly different method of delivery for his missile. But when Ignatz and Krazy witness the mega-brick explosion in the desert, Krazy becomes depressed, and refuses to perform. To coax her back to work so they can regain their lost limelight, Ignatz invents his own brand of psychotherapy, orchestrates her kidnapping, and tries to seduce Krazy with promises of stardom from a Hollywood producer. As the mouse confronts the Kat with bewildering new concepts like sex, death, and politics, Ignatz and Krazy begin yearning to become round, for a fullness of body and spirit beyond their two-dimensional realm.Forming an altogether witty and winning counterpoint to George Herriman’s classic comic strip, Jay Cantor’s kinetic novel has become a classic in its own right, one of those masterpieces that creates its own unforgettable universe.

    The Light in My Window is a dynamic story of searching, discovery, and peace as Hope struggles with herself, God, and her love for Stan.

    We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more: when automatic glass doors open before them, they feel that surely they must have been mistaken for somebody important. Pressing an elevator button and the elevator closing its doors and rising, they have a feeling of power at the fact that the elevator is obeying them. Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother severely brain-damaged and the other lost and virtually orphaned in a strange land. Ajay, the family's younger son, prays to a God he envisions as Superman, longing to find his place amid the ruins of his family's new life.Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival."

    This is the UK of the summer of 1977 - in the midst of the Silver Jubilee celebrations, a generation are trying to grow up and discovering the limits of freedom. It is 16th August 1977 - the night Elvis died - and for the heroes of STORIES WE COULD TELL, this night is where their adult lives begin. Terry has returned from Berlin glowing in the light of his friendship with ageing rock star Dag Wood, the only man to be booed off stage at Woodstock. But when Dag turns up in London, he sets his sights on a photographer called Misty, the young woman who Terry plans to have children with. Will Terry's relationship survive the night? Ray is the only writer on The Paper who refuses to cut his hair and stop wearing flares. He still believes in peace, love and the Beatles. But John Lennon is in town for one night, en route to Yoko and Japan, and Ray believes that if he can interview the reclusive Beatle, he can save his job. Can John Lennon really change a young man's life? And Leon has annoyed the group of fans you do not want to annoy - the Dagenham Dogs, a bunch of hooligans who follow a group called the Sewer Rats, who have just been given a right royal slagging by young Leon. Hiding out in a disco called the Goldmine, Leon meets the girl of his dreams. Will true love find Leon before the Dagenham Dogs?

    Gradually, he discovers he was brought back by his true love, Isabelle, because she is pregnant with their child—a child who, if raised correctly, will play a crucial role in saving the universe. But to be brought up right, the child must learn what Vincent learned on the other side—if only Vincent can remember it. On a father’s love and struggle may depend the future of everything that is.By turns quirky, romantic, awesome, and irresistible, White Apples is a tale of love, fatherhood, death, and life that will leave you seeing the world with new eyes.