When she wanders into a small, locally-owned bakery to inquire about an opening advertised in the window, she meets Gwen. Gwen is a thirty-something divorcee who decided to give up her lucrative career and start her own business. But little do people know, her business is failing and she has no clue how to revive it, until Temperance comes along. Temperance tries her best to hide the real reason she's put down roots in a place far different than where she'd ever choose to live and far away from home, where she left everything she loves behind for the little girl who holds her heart. Sooner rather than later, Temperance knows that with decisions come consequences, ones she may not be willing or ready to accept. Two women. One tiny bakery. One precocious little girl. Will cupcakes keep them together? WARNING: This novel contains strong language and strong sexual content. Intended for 18+ years and above.

    These “seven stories” lead to a charming and surprising ending.Cast of 2 women and 3 men.

    MacLeod’s young protagonist enters all the bright open avenues of peer-group play and the dark blind alleys of individual and collective terror, as she discovers within herself both the capacity for and the conflict between impulses of good and evil. In thinking back on the history of her own tight-knit group of friends, she begins to see how in the excitement of belonging to a ritualized, secret collective, the self is created by the increasing dehumanization of the other—of both the bully and the victim. The Shape of a Girl goes far beyond a simple dramatization of the seemingly inexplicable code of silence and tacit complicity which surrounded the sensationalized Reena Virk murder in 1997 on which the play is based. It speaks eloquently and compassionately to a world increasingly dominated by all forms of collectivised and ritualized tribalist hatred, and offers the embrace of trust as the only way out of this circle of violence.Jewel is also based on a real-life catastrophe—the sinking of the Ocean Ranger, an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland, on Valentine’s Day, 1982. Three years later, a widow, Marjorie Clifford, at home in her trailer in Fort St. John, British Columbia, begins to take the first step in understanding that the humanity of love, in all of its tentative frailty, uncertainty and promise, can free a life paralyzed and dominated by loss.

    But in her small town of Edgewater, Indiana, that's like asking for the moon.Alyssa Greene is her high school's "it" girl: popular, head of the student council, and daughter of the PTA president. She also has a secret. She's been dating Emma for the last year and a half.When word gets out that Emma plans to bring a girl as her date, it stirs a community-wide uproar that spirals out of control. Now, the PTA, led by Alyssa's mother, is threatening to cancel the prom altogether.Enter Barry Glickman and Dee Dee Allen, two Broadway has-beens who see Emma's story as the perfect opportunity to restore their place in the limelight. But when they arrive in Indiana to fight on Emma's behalf, their good intentions go quickly south.Between Emma facing the fray head-on, Alyssa wavering about coming out, and Barry and Dee Dee basking in all the attention, it's the perfect prom storm. Only when this unlikely group comes together do they realize that love is always worth fighting for.

    Amongst Millbank’s murderers and common thieves, Margaret finds herself increasingly fascinated by an apparently innocent inmate, the enigmatic spiritualist Selina Dawes. Selina was imprisoned after a séance she was conducting went horribly awry, leaving an elderly matron dead and a young woman deeply disturbed. Although initially skeptical of Selina’s gifts, Margaret is soon drawn into a twilight world of ghosts and shadows, unruly spirits and unseemly passions, until she is at last driven to concoct a desperate plot to secure Selina’s freedom, and her own.

    His parents retired and moved to Florida. That doesn't mean his family isn't still in Jersey. In fact, he sees both sets of his grandparents every Sunday for dinner. This is routine until he has to tell them that he's been offered a dream job. The job he's been waiting for - marketing executive - would take him away from his beloved, but annoying, grandparents. He tells them. The news doesn't sit so well. Thus begins a series of schemes to keep Nick around. How could he betray his family's love to move to Seattle for a job, wonder his grandparents? Well, Frank, Aida, Nunzio, and Emma do their level best, that includes bringing the lovely - and single - Caitlin O'Hare as bait.

    Nic's had theatre friends and orchestra friends, but never just friend friends. And she's certainly never had a relationship.But on the very first day, she falls in with Katrina the Manic Computer Chick, Isaac the Nice-Guy-Despite-Himself, Kevin the Inarticulate Composer... and Battle.Battle Hall Davies is a beautiful blond dancer from North Carolina. She's everything Nic isn't. Soon the two are friends - and then, startlingly, more than friends. What do you do when you think you're attracted to guys, and then you meet a girl who steals your heart?

     In remote Pakistan, Nick Bright awaits his fate. A successful financial trader, Nick is kidnapped by an Islamic militant group, but with no one negotiating his release, he agrees to an unusual plan. He will earn his own ransom by helping his captors manipulate and master the world commodities and currency markets. "[A] tense, provocative thriller about the unholy nexus of international terrorism and big bucks...."-Seattle Times "Ahktar again turns hypersensitive subjects into thought-provoking and thoughtful drama"-Newsday "The prime theme is pulsing and alive: when human lives become just one more commodity to be traded, blood eventually flows in the streets"-Financial Times "Whip-smart and twisty"-Time Out New York "The Invisible Hand offers genuine insight into the future of the West" (Village Voice).

    A romantic comedy that recognizes the absurdity of life.

    When tragedy strikes, Rachel is separated from her brother Sam and sent to a Jewish orphanage where Dr. Mildred Solomon is conducting medical research. Subjected to X-ray treatments that leave her disfigured, Rachel suffers years of cruel harassment from the other orphans. But when she turns fifteen, she runs away to Colorado hoping to find the brother she lost and discovers a family she never knew she had.Though Rachel believes she’s shut out her painful childhood memories, years later she is confronted with her dark past when she becomes a nurse at Manhattan’s Old Hebrews Home and her patient is none other than the elderly, cancer-stricken Dr. Solomon. Rachel becomes obsessed with making Dr. Solomon acknowledge, and pay for, her wrongdoing. But each passing hour Rachel spends with the old doctor reveal to Rachel the complexities of her own nature. She realizes that a person’s fate—to be one who inflicts harm or one who heals—is not always set in stone.Lush in historical detail, rich in atmosphere and based on true events, Orphan #8 is a powerful, affecting novel of the unexpected choices we are compelled to make that can shape our destinies.

    It was like a tiny bit of Dorothy’s Oz in boring old black-and-white Kansas. Pink was for girls.Ava Simpson is trying on a whole new image. Stripping the black dye from her hair, she heads off to the Billy Hughes School for Academic Excellence, leaving her uber-cool girlfriend, Chloe, behind.Ava is quickly taken under the wing of perky, popular Alexis who insists that: a) she’s a perfect match for handsome Ethan; and b) she absolutely must audition for the school musical.But while she’s busy trying to fit in — with Chloe, with Alexis and her Pastel friends, even with the misfits in the stage crew — Ava fails to notice that her shiny reinvented life is far more fragile than she imagined.Debut author Wikinson takes a lighthearted but timely and resonant look at a teen's attempts to don a new personality and figure out who she really wants to be.

    But before she can hit send, her girlfriend reveals that he has always identified as a man and now wants to start living as one.Now Alice must face a question she never thought she'd ask . . . does this mean she's straight?A bittersweet comedy about gender, sexuality and being a long way from home.A programme text edition which was published to coincide with the world premiere at Theatre503, London, on 27 October 2015

    . . Other Girls.

    is a series of women's monologues tackling many different aspects of the complex female psyche.

    Catherine Ryan-Barrett, running from the fame and fortune of her family name, wants nothing more to spend the winter alone and sequestered in her high mountain cabin. She is not prepared for a party crasher. After spending two months together, they form an unlikely friendship that deepens even further. But after the spring thaw, Jen leaves and returns to her life in Santa Fe—and to the man who wants to marry her. All she knows of the woman who rescued her is her name . . . Ryan.