Two little boys joined our family when the bitter winter weather was still chilling our bones and their dad was absolutely destitute, no home, no money and no hope of getting his children back with a social worker who seemed to be a bit of a ladies man and favoured their mother. Steve was the second father we had met that would do anything and everything to get his children home…once he had managed to clean himself up and convince the department of Social Services that he would stay off the drink, stay away from women and that he intended to raise his sons in a happy and safe family home. We had to bend a few rules...then break a couple of them in order to help keep this family together…the rewards are immeasurable and, until now, I guess no-one but us and our nearest and dearest (and of course Elizabeth) knew how far we were willing to go to make sure that the right outcome for this placement happened in the end. This placement more than any other we have had, taught me that the determination that one man can have to save his family, against the determination of a department that knows he can’t is a powerful thing, and love really can conquer all.

    

    And yet, when she finally does have something like that life, as a wife and mother in 1980s London, she is the one blaring music from her room, necking vodka and valium and making an almighty mess of her home and family.Cleaning other people’s houses, eventually, is the only option left. At 50 years old, post rehab, living alone in a Hackney bedsit, Michele finds herself finishing her working life as she had begun, “in a dumb job that you do when you can’t really do anything else...”This is a remarkable, powerful, and often unbearably funny memoir in which cleaning and getting clean intertwine as a strange and magical form of redemption. Michele Kirsch is a Nora Ephron for the modern age.

    Prostitute. Gangster’s Wife. Survivor. Tara grew up in squalor on the island of Alderney. When she was only four, she was sexually abused by one of her mother’s many lovers, a horror that continued for five long years. As a teenager, desperate to escape the toxic environment at home, she fled to London – but was swiftly drawn into working as a prostitute. She became involved with some of London’s most notorious gangsters – even marrying one – but when she realised the danger she was inflicting on her children, she knew she had to find a way to get out. This is the inspiring story of one woman’s will to survive, and to fight for a better life.

    Additional narrators include Geoffrey Palmer O.B.E., Sir Donald Sinden, and Elaine Stritch. Music: 'Reverie De Sebastian' by Steve Davies.

    Author GM Matheny was a US Navy saturation diver on the nuclear submarine USS Halibut. Involved in Operation Ivy Bells. America's most important (and most dangerous of the Cold War) clandestine operations. If you like good old fashioned American bravado, espionage and American history, you will enjoy this book. GOD & SPIES is a firsthand account of America's greatest intelligence coup! Operation Ivy Bells was not a onetime intercept of foreign intelligence but an ongoing operation of multiple Soviet military channels! Another reason for the high interest in our operation was the audacious nature in which it was done—with not one person risking his neck but the crews of two US Navy nuclear submarines which rendezvoused in Soviet territorial waters. “How did I end up as a navy diver, four hundred feet down in a frigid Russian sea? After making my dad totally disgusted with me, I set out to make him happy. ‘Honor thy father’ - I struggled with a decision to serve God. ‘Lord, I will give my life to you and serve you if you let me make this dive.’ But I had the impression He only wanted to know one thing: ‘What if I do not let you? Will you serve me anyway?’”

    A REAL DESIRE. FRIENDS WITH NO BENEFITS HAS NEVER BEEN HOTTER! All Jazzed Up by Tracy Ellen is the first book in a brand new series Love, Lies, & Ninja Missions. A wickedly delicious, stand-alone, HEA romance you’ll want to read again and again! Jazy is freaking out. But waking up one day to the gut-wrenching realization she’s fallen in love with a player, who also happens to be her best guy friend, would be enough to freak any girl out. If that isn’t bad enough, Jazy knows the wealthy, incredibly sexy Max Byrd is just not into her that way. To Max, she’s his best, and only, platonic girl pal. But Max has problems, too. He suspects another woman is trying to trap him into marriage. Max naturally turns to Jazy and begs for her help. Reluctantly agreeing to Max’s idiotic scheme of a pretend marriage, Jazy soon perks up and decides to take control of her life. After all, she is a horse-whispering, Celtic Cursing, straight-shooting, potion-mixing, sex-loving Axelrod woman! And there’s nothing an Axelrod woman can't accomplish if she sets her mind to the task, and Jazy wants Max’s love. Armed with determination and her unique talents, can Jazy seduce the cynical womanizer Max to believe in “True Love” and happily-ever-after? Or will Jazy learn real love needs no convincing? Preorder your copy today of the tantalizing All Jazzed Up, Book One in the Love, Lies, & Ninja Missions series! (Psst…you don’t have to read The Adventures of Anabel Axelrod series first to enjoy Jazy’s story. But for those of you that have, All Jazzed Up is a spin-off novel from the series and takes place immediately after Coupled with Chance.) Note from the author: All Jazzed Up is meant to entertain 18+ adult audiences and contains swearing, sexual situations, and mild violence. Other Books by Tracy Ellen… The Adventures of Anabel Axelrod ongoing series A Date with Fate, Volume I Courted by Karma, Volume II In Love by Design, Volume III Adieu to Destiny, Volume IV Family & Fortune, Volume V Coupled with Chance, Volume VI The Kiss of Kismet, Volume VII (For Sale February 14, 2017!) Love, Lies, & Ninja Missions series All Jazzed Up (Preorder now! For Sale December 15, 2016!) Undying Love Series Acadia’s Law: Book One Acadia’s Revenge: Book Two Acadia’s Apocalypse: Book Three (Coming winter 2017!) Thank you! Let's stay in touch. Sign up for my newsletter at www.tracyellenink.com

    He ignored my desire for him and pushed me aside. Carl was always, never ending, in the back of my mind. I won’t let him do the same mistake twice.” Book #2: First Taste“Stan was my white knight in shining armor and I wanted to pay him back in kind. He was just as handsome as before, but this time he was looking at me with need in his eyes. All I needed was to feel his arms around me, his lips on mine…”Book #3: First Lust“Why did my brother’s best friend have to be so damn sexy? Teddy was back, and lightning strikes the same place twice. I didn’t want to say no to him anymore.” Book #4: First Time“I touched her in the most intimate ways, on her parent’s couch. David wasn’t supposed to fall for his best friend’s little sister. But he couldn’t help it.” First Love is the complete series box set. As always, lots of love and romance and a very satisfying HEA for your reading pleasure!

    Great Freedom, whereby you are not bound by the life you live in.The writings of Truth that guides you to the life of wisdom, cleanses your mind and leads you to the true and eternal world.

    Some are long, other mere vignettes; some are moving and serious, others are light-hearted even humorous. Some cover hard-won victories and success, others defeats and reversal; some describe acts of great valor, others incidents reflecting human frailties. All however, are worth reading and give a very accurate picture of war at its bitterest, when men are drawn together and individuals are under that most demanding microscope of their fellow comrades-in-arms.

    Sarah and Cory would take Adrienne's body to Sarah's grandparents' farm where they attempted to burn it to no avail. They would then recruit another friend to help dismember the body after which they would dump it in a historic site. The three then went and ate lunch at McDonald's to celebrate their crime. What would ever possess these teens to commit such a horrific crime?

    Here you’ll find an exploration of pain, heartbreak and wonder at what the world might bring us next.

    He rose from poverty in the city's East End to amass a vast fortune from crime and, when he died in 2007, his empire stretched from Glasgow to the Canaries. When he was alive, few would talk openly about the man known as 'The Licensee'. But now his incredible, untold story can finally be revealed. Real stories about the time McGraw cheated The Godfather, risking his life to end a dynasty. How he was behind the UK's biggest coke heist and who paid the price. Who killed the six Doyles in the Ice Cream Wars. Why the BarL Team was never caught even with MI5 on their case. Armed jail breakouts - who arranged them, who grassed them. There are hit contracts, backstabbings, vendettas and scores to settle with everyone from The Godfather to The Devil, M Family, Specky Boyd and Paul Ferris. McGraw did all that and much more yet was never caught. Why? He was The Licensee. Licensed to Commit Crime.

    Here is a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language."--Publishers WeeklyStarred Review in Booklist "[C]hoices of poems from each of Harrison's books are passionate and sharp... Of special note is a section from Letters to Yesenin, a book-length poem, and the title poem from The Theory and Practice of Rivers , which contains these echoing lines, 'I forgot where I heard that poems / are designed to waken sleeping gods.' Reading this essential volume, one might imagine that the gods are, indeed, staying up late, reading lights on, turning the pages."Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems is distilled from fourteen volumes--from visionary lyrics and meditative suites to shape-shifting ghazals and prose-poem letters. Teeming throughout these pages are Harrison's legendary passions and appetites, his meditations, rages, and love-songs to the natural world.The New York Times concluded a review from early in Harrison's career with a provocative quote: "This is poetry worth loving, hating, and fighting over, a subjective mirror of our American days and needs." That sentiment still holds true, as Jim Harrison's essential poems continue to call for our fiercest attention.Also included are full-color images of poem drafts--both typescripts and holographs--as well as the letter Denise Levertov sent to publisher W.W. Norton in the early 1960s, advocating for Harrison's debut collection.In his essay "Poetry as Survival," Jim Harrison wrote, "Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak." The Essential Poems is proof positive that Jim Harrison taught his soul to speak."In this unforgiving literary moment, we must deal honestly with [Harrison's] life and work, as they are inextricable in a way that is not true of other poets...These poems bear-crawl gorgeously after a genuine connection to being, thrashing in giant leaps through the underbrush to find consolation, purpose, and redemption. In his raw, original keening he ambushes moments of unimaginable beauty, one after another, line after line...The Essential Poems demonstrates perfectly why we should turn to Harrison again. He lived and breathed an American confrontation with the physical earth, married himself to a universe of bodies and stumps and birds, did not try to shuck his grotesque masculinity and stared hard with his one good eye (the left was blinded when he was seven) at the inescapable, beckoning finger of death." --Dean Kuipers, LitHub"The Essential Poems provides a good introduction--or reintroduction--to the work of this singular writer... these pieces illustrate Harrison's range and his ease with various formats, from lyric poems to meditative suites to prose poems. They also spotlight his deep, rugged kinship with rural landscapes and the natural world, where 'the cost of flight is landing.'" --The Washington Post"Jim Harrison's latest collection, The Essential Poems, contains...engaging and enlightening poems [that] should be taught, learned, and loved. Remember this."--New York Journal of Books"Had he been a chef, all the other foodies would have talked about how Jim Harrison dealt with big flavors. In his poems, they're all there -- love and death, remorse and longing, the rocket contrails of living. There's not a lot of small talk in The Essential Poems... this book grabs you by the collar and tells you in eleven hundred ways to wake up."--John Freeman, Executive Editor, "Recommended Reading from Lit Hub Staff""Jim Harrison had an appetite. He devoured the natural world with gusto and wrote about it with wild energy and sweetly caustic wit...Harrison was also a prodigious poet, and this thoughtfully curated collection [The Essential Poems] showcases him at his best. Like his fiction, the poems observe the collision between civilization and the wildness outside our cities; they act like geocaches both harrowing and beautiful... Organized chronologically, the material here becomes a time line distilling Harrison's signature concerns."--Alta"It is hard-boiled poetry, some of the best of its kind, and one is not surprised to know that Harrison has written very tough novels... His poetic vision is at the heart of it all."--Harper's

    After a quick engagement and marriage, the couple produce four childrenand are joined by boarder Mary Snelling, who teaches at the country school across the road. This addictive story winds through many twists before ending in a deadly rampage that results in one of the most notorious ax murders in American history.