Unputdownable.” — Penny Hancock, author of Tideline How many secrets can a family hide? 19-year-old Josh Maitland is at the end of a gap-year trip round the world when the tsunami hits the Canary Islands. His family are devastated at the loss of someone they thought would outlive them all: mother Diana, advertising executive and shatterer of glass ceilings; older siblings Rachel and Jem, each contemplating a serious relationship after years of sidestepped commitment; and stepfather Colin, no stranger to loss, who finds himself frozen out by his wife's grief. It's only with the discovery of the private blog Josh was writing for his friends that the significance of his travels becomes clear. It reveals secrets he knew about everyone in the family — and one about himself that will change the way they think of him forever.

    Another guards her secrets in order to stay sane. When Julia Rosenthal returns to England and visits her suburban childhood home, the memories and unspoken tensions of family life come flooding back. Looking for clues and determined to find some answers, she tries to make sense of her odd childhood and understand why her free-spirited brother has a much easier relationship with her teenage daughter. In a different place and time, Julia’s mother struggles to tell her own story, gradually revealing the secrets of her early years in wartime Germany—secrets she has carried through the century—until past and present collide with unexpected and haunting results. This gripping and beautifully crafted post-Holocaust novel unravels the impact of a war that resonates across generations and interweaves universal themes—the nature of identity, the meaning of family, and the emotional legacy of the past.

    The bridge holds many secrets.Two hurting women face each other on this night, destinies merging. Mistakes have been made, people have been hurt, and these two are the victims. After the many years, they are ready to give up, ready to end it all. But one thing keeps them from giving up.The bridge holds many secrets, and the city breeds scum. But together, they can heal and help.This passionate, emotional story about the power of forgiveness takes you far away, to a city you'll always remember and never forget. Follow me to the place where mercy and grace mingle, where love and pain go hand-in-hand. Follow me to the bridge.

    There he meets the eminent professor, Gordon Stone, and his beautiful wife, Judith Silver, with whom he soon falls into a passionate affair. Into this explosive mix, a young woman appears--a single mother at the end of her emotional rope. Crystal desperately needs David. Yet caught between two women, David bears witness to a heartbreaking turn of events that seems as inevitable as the push and pull of ocean waves. . . .

    She finds herself ousted from the family home and separated from their remaining son, Andy.As Jan tries to cope with her grief and prepares to build a new life, it soon becomes known that Simon has left behind a bombshell, and her younger son seeks ways of compensating for his loss, leading to further issues for her to deal with.Can Jan hold it all together and save her marriage and her family?

    In the first, Jeff Lyndsay & Sylvie Donovan discuss his career trajectory. Can he live with being happy in his job? The Vignette #2, Stephanie and Kayla Armstrong agree that it is time to celebrate small joys. The third vignette focuses on Henry's panic as he begs his parents for input as to whether or not he should make a big deal out of Mother's Day for Polly. Vignette #4 is a familiar story to many parents. How do you get your kids moving in the morning? Sylvie always has an answer. The final vignette is a fun little furry look at living in Sycamore House.The Bellingwood books are written from Polly's perspective and every once in a while it's fun to look at what's happening behind the scenes from the viewpoint of other characters. These vignettes were originally published on the nammynools.com website and in the monthly email newsletter to Bellingwood readers.

    She doesn’t believe in love since watching her father walk out on her mother years ago. After divorcing his cheating wife, Bryson Blackstone is content with living his life as a single man, running his business and staying busy. But his focus is soon diverted to Kalina Cooper – a beautiful woman he sees every evening in a café. * * * The Blackstone Family novels are all standalone books. Any follow-up short stories correspond to the full-length novel. Book 1 - Evenings With Bryson (Bryson and Kalina) Book 2 - Leaving Barringer (Barringer and Calista) Book 2.5 - Forever Us: Barringer and Calista Blackstone - A Short Story Book 3 - The Things Everson Lost (Everson and June)

    But for Yakov, who questions his faith from an early age, becoming a rabbi is more an obligation than a calling. One summer, he discovers love in Rebecca, a young woman who challenges both his beliefs and his doubts. All too quickly, a family secret tears them apart and their lives diverge. Confused and curious, Yakov pursues a secular education alongside his rabbinical training. A chance encounter reunites him with Rebecca, who he learns is also studying to become a rabbi. His relationship with her blooms as he and his father continue to drift. But what will become of his relationship with God? This 20th anniversary re-release of Rabbi, Rabbi, Kane’s debut novel, is a masterfully written, deeply engrossing portrait of modern American Judaism. Now more than ever, Kane’s intimate prose will move any reader who has ever struggled with the complexities of faith, family, love, and personal identity.

    But as she plans her escape to New York City, turmoil erupts and the demands of family stand between her and her suitcase. Darla must, for the first time in her life, cast an unflinching eye on the hard-to-accept truths regarding love, responsibility, and survival. The Bingo Queens of Paradise lyrically blends a powerful comic voice with a poignant tale of a woman who longs to pursue her dreams.

    It ends with a promise. On her deathbed Frances extracts it from her three daughters—the utterly capable homemaker Alice; the recalcitrant Allegra, a recovering alcoholic; and bohemian Edie, who shrinks in the face of any commitment: their promise to “look after Libba.” As if the formidable, tough-minded Libba Charles, author of ten books, a literary celebrity, needed looking after. Yet when they are summoned by Libba to Creek Cabin, their mother’s summer hideaway in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, they go. None of them is prepared, though, for what they will discover there—about their mother, about Libba, about themselves—in this poignant, adroit rendering of reunions and farewells.

    It is the second Paul Muller novel set in Europe before World War II. Muller is recruited to become a spy to resist Hitler's campaign to absorb Austria into the German Reich and, from his perch in Vienna, finds himself at the epicenter of the desperate struggle to preserve Austrian independence. Muller plays a dangerous game in helping Austria oppose Hitler's demands and he hatches a bold plan to divert Austria's gold reserves so they stay out of Hitler's grasp. The novel captures this gripping drama in rich and vivid detail as political pressures mount and the threat of war looms. A Spy in Vienna re-creates for readers the fraught atmosphere of 1930's, when the threat of Nazi violence hung over Europe. Aficionados of that epoch will relish the authenticity of the novel, which reawakens the tensions and turbulence of the era, with its undercurrent of violence and fear. The narrative recaptures the urgency of the crisis as repeated confrontations escalated to an explosive conclusion. Today, sitting at the safe remove of eighty years, we know the outcome. Hitler's bald aggression prevailed; his takeover of Austria became a crucial stepping stone leading to World War II. But the characters in the novel know none of this; for them, the events they are caught up in are frightening and bewildering, confronting them with dire choices and fearful consequences. The novel transports the reader into that contemporary maelstrom of intrigue and danger—combining real history with a compelling story. Admirers of Paul Muller in Danzig will revel in his new adventures in Vienna, as once again he confronts Nazi tyranny.

    In the aftermath, Walt forms two new relationships: one with Ginger Newton, a privileged, reckless, Harvard undergraduate who is interviewing women about their lives for a book called Girls I Know, and the other with 11-year-old Mercedes Bittles, whose parents were killed in the restaurant. Wounded but resilient, all three must deal with loss and grief and the consequences that come when their lives change in unexpected ways.

    In this sordid and hilarious tale of whopping academic grants, sleeping on the job, sexual confusion and consenting adults, terrifying departmental secretaries, surprise impregnations and alcoholic lecturers we might conclude that most people are just not cut out for university life.

    Bingham's strange sense of morbid fancy collides with a gutsy realism; the result is splendid wreckage: a young man is seduced by his first cousin (or maybe it's the other way around) at her brother's wake ("The Other Family"); a bored couple plot to kill a man during their ski-resort honeymoon ("Marriage Is Murder"); a yuppie banker risks his whole perfect life for an affair with a junkie ("The Fixers"); an insurance-company bounty hunter tracks down walk-aways from drug and alcohol rehab ("Preexisting Condition"); and in the title story, an eleven-year-old boy is caught at the exquisitely uneasy intersection of the safety of childhood play and the pain of grown-up love and longing.These lean, potent stories are utterly original, and yet by turns recall Salinger, in their intellectual acuity, emotional depth, and wicked, dark humor; Fitzgerald, in their vivid chronicling of a new, restless social elite; and the work of "transgressive" writers, in their pervasive sense of the imminent possibility of danger and violence, even in the most civilized surroundings. Above all, the stories in Pure Slaughter Value mark the debut of a striking new literary voice--unsparing, bold, ironic, and true--that will haunt us for a long time to come.