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Orchard of Dust
Brian Edward Bahr - 2009
Product DescriptionPublishers Description:A Prohibition-era novel centering around the occurrence of a dust storm in southern Minnesota, Orchard of Dust follows the lives of a boy and his father as their town is invaded by a speakeasy.From the Back Cover:In the quiet born to the soil, the coming of a fresh generation quaked and rumbled as a people, displaced from their land, dreamed of once and tomorrow; they followed promised whispers of abundance through a desolation where men ripped at the land, wrenching what harvest the fields could spit until a protestation came against man, strangling the fields in dust; and this people broke their homes, shattering hearthstones against the collapsed shelter of forgotten desires that had turned to dead leaves.
An Irish Tail: A hilarious tale of an English couple and their unruly dogs, searching for a new life in rural Ireland
Nick Albert - 2012
For many years, Nick and Lesley Albert had shared a dream of living far away from the stress of modern life, and when the opportunity arose, they jumped in with both feet. Almost overnight, they decided to move to beautiful County Clare, in the west of Ireland – a Country they had never before visited. With little experience or money they set about renovating a derelict farmhouse and building a new life together - hindered only by their lack of skill, twenty-two chickens ,two ducks and several unruly dogs. Bursting with comical anecdotes and witty observations, blended with occasional moments of exquisite sadness, this is a delightful true story of an English couple searching for a new life in the quiet solitude of rural Ireland."Marley and Me" meets "Round Ireland with a Fridge." If you love dogs, Ireland and life, then you will adore “An Irish Tail”.
My Week at the Blue Angel: Stories from the Storm Drains, Strip Clubs, and Trailer Parks of Las Vegas
Matthew O'Brien - 2010
Thompson’s Las Vegas, with the Good Doctor as tour guide. A Lord of the Rings-like adventure in the city’s underground flood channels. A seven-day stay at a seedy motel on East Fremont Street.The stories in My Week at the Blue Angel aren’t about Steve Wynn, Cirque du Soleil, or how to play poker and they aren’t set in Caesars Palace, XS Nightclub, or a 2,000-seat showroom. They’re about prostitutes, ex-cons, and the homeless and they’re set under Caesars Palace and in trailer parks and weekly motels.In this creative-nonfiction collection, Matthew O’Brien—author of Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas—and veteran photographer Bill Hughes show a side of the city rarely seen. A side beyond the neon lights, themed facades, and motel-room doors. A side beyond the barbwire fences, “No Trespassing” signs, and midnight shadows.A side of Las Vegas many locals and visitors are curious about, but few ever explore.
The Verde Sanctuary
L.W. Samuelson - 2014
An old rancher takes him in and teaches him how to wrangle cattle. The refugee learns to break horses and gains notoriety as a horse whisperer. Soon the stranger and rancher develop a deeply abiding friendship. The old man and his wife come to depend on Travis as they age and become helpless. They devise a plan to deed their ranch to him until their daughter finds out. She allies herself with a wealthy land owner and together they try to prove the old rancher and his wife are incompetent and that Windy, the daughter, should be given power of attorney for her parents. As the battle ensues, the old couple's health deteriorates. Who will prevail in Travis's attempt to find sanctuary? Is blood thicker than water or do those who care for you constitute family? This story, at times poignant, at times humorous, explores family, ranch life, and a friendship between two people from different worlds.
Harlot's Sauce: A Memoir of Food, Family, Love, Loss, and Greece
Patricia V. Davis - 2008
This is just one of many wrong reasons why Patricia is all the more determined to do so. She even moves with Gregori to Greece, where he insists he must be in order to be happy. Once there, she discovers that though she might not save her marriage, she just might save herself. With vivid descriptions of life in beautiful, modern-day Greece, this memoir is both a tasty treat and an exhilarating sail on the Hellenic seas through xenophobia, dysfunctional family units, religious ravings, obsessive protocols, political disorder, European football, and fabulous food. As the Italians say, Buon Appetito! (Good Appetite!) As the Greeks say, Kalo Taxidi! (Good Voyage!)
Sea Trials: Around the World with Duct Tape and Bailing Wire
Wendy Hinman - 2017
Not for the Wilcox family. To triumph, they must rebuild their boat on a remote Pacific island. Damage sustained on the reef and a lack of resources haunt them the rest of the way around the world as they face daunting obstacles, including wild weather, pirates, gun boats, mines and thieves, plus pesky bureaucrats and cockroaches as stubborn as the family. Without a working engine and no way to communicate with the outside world, they struggle to reach home before their broken rig comes crashing down and they run out of food in a trial that tests them to their limits.
The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist
Dan Jenkins - 2001
After thirty years of waiting for the follow-up, Jenkins returns to the world of big-time golf in The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist and finds a world where endorsements and course fashion matter more than the side bet. His hero, Bobby Joe Grooves, is a hell-raising two-iron-wielding rogue trying to turn his one annual tournament win and considerable Texas charm into a spot on the Ryder Cup team. Standing between Bobby Joe and his little spot of golf heaven are two ex-wives, a girlfriend, various pious PGA officials, and his embarrassing lack of a career major. A book that will teach you more about golf history than any weepy sunset-over-the-eighteenth-green retrospective, The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist is an uproarious portrait of what it’s really like to play on the PGA Tour. It’s vintage Dan Jenkins.
So Help Me God
Larry D. Thompson - 2004
Lord “The courtroom drama and testimony are brilliantly conceived and carried out…a thoughtful, complex and timely novel, a compelling story one is loath to put aside to do one’s daily work.”—Galveston Daily News "So Help Me God is not only a page-turner but a warning as well. Through a deft, fascinating storyline Larry D. Thompson shows us what can happen here if we're not careful."—Ed Gorman“So Help Me God is an exciting legal thriller that takes the reader on a sizzling ride as a courtroom becomes the battlefield over one of the most controversial social issues of our time. Not since the Scopes Monkey Trial has a man of religion and a man of ideas clashed so dramatically and brilliantly in a courtroom.” –Junius Podrug, award winning author of Presumed Guilty“I don’t think I have ever read anything quite so compelling. Everything was woven together beautifully and could only have been done so by someone who had actually lived through similar experiences in the courtroom.”—pennyterk.com“Move over John Grisham!”—Denton A. Cooley, MD, world-renowned pioneer heart surgeon“Seldom does a first effort at courtroom fiction find itself in the class of such notables as Inherit the Wind, The Verdict, and The Rainmaker. But Larry Thompson’s So Help Me God belongs there. I predict it will become a modern day classic courtroom tale.”—Jim Perdue, Sr., nationally renowned trial lawyer and author of I Remember Atticus“I hated to finish that last page of So Help Me God…the courtroom scenes are both realistic and spell-binding.”—Hartley Hampton, past president of the Texas Trial Lawyers AssociationAbout the AuthorA veteran Texas trial lawyer, LARRY D. THOMPSON has drawn upon decades of experience in the courtroom to produce his first novel, So Help Me God. Thompson, a one-time journalism major who used his talent for writing to excel at the University of Texas School of Law, is now managing partner of the Houston trial firm he founded. Recently honored by Texas Monthly Magazine as a "Texas Super Lawyer," he is the proud father of three grown children, an active golfer, SCUBA diver, runner, and outdoor enthusiast. His biggest inspiration both in life and literature is his late brother, best-selling author Thomas Thompson.
Balilicious - The Bali Diaries
Becky Wicks - 2012
Now she turns her attention to Bali as she hilariously navigates life as an adopted Balinese local.A lot can happen when you set out to 'find yourself'. Sometimes, you can even lose the plot.From visiting ancient healers with cellphone addictions to leaving a shaking ashram intent on extracting her soul, Becky Wicks soon discovered that six months travelling round Bali wasn't all going to be about finding inner peace and harmony. In fact, the perils of possessed teens, eating raw, yogic headstands, diving shipwrecks and dicing with black magic and demons all took their toll on the Island of the Gods.And that was before the vaginal steaming.Becky Wicks lifts the sarong on real life in Bali in a blur of locals, tourists, expats and other other eating, praying lovers who arrive... you know... not really knowing who they are.
Murder in Silence
Gary Kassay - 2011
With no witnesses, no forensic evidence, and two bizarre clues to follow, the case falls to Inspector Duke Becker, head of the high profile Special Investigations Unit, Homicide. Becker and his squad must find the killer before more cops are murdered. The case will lead Becker on a wild chase through the streets of New York City, back over 15 years into the past and to a cover-up that will rock City Hall. Along with his brash, wildly dressed young partner, Jimmy Nova, the beautiful Michelle Goldman, Augie "Doggie" Rivera, and the Mutt and Jeff team of Bobby Green and Joe Robinson, Becker will need to enlist his boyhood friend in charge of CSU, Manny Velez. Add a ruthless newswoman known to the NYPD as "Wicked Witch Wilson" and a new love interest for Becker in the gorgeous and brilliant Dr. Elizabeth Cunningham, Becker is about to embark on the most difficult and dangerous case in his 20 plus years. Will Becker and his squad be able to catch the killer before more cops die or will the killer have the last laugh?
A Man You Can Bank On
Derek Hansen - 2011
This former bank manager helped them transform three million dollars - stolen from bookies by a gang of robbers - into a rescue package for their dying town.But now the day of reckoning has come.The crims want the money.The cops want the money.A rogue insurance investigator wants the money.And so do Australia's two most notorious hit men.In trying to save his town, Lambert is forced to risk everything - his life, the lives of the town folk, his own daughter, ten thousand barramundi and a really lovable Jack Russell.
Rosette: A Novel of Pioneer Michigan
Cindy Rinaman Marsch - 2016
Her real-life journal recounts two years of homesteading, history hints at the next six decades, and the novel explores the truth. We meet Rosette in 1888 as she revises the wedding-day page of her journal. In lush detail, in the voices of Rosette and others, the novel traces how we both choose and suffer our destiny, how hopes come to naught and sometimes rise from the wreckage. In a style reminiscent of Willa Cather, in a family saga that recalls the work of Marilynne Robinson, this novel brings us enduring themes of human life as Rosette and her friends and family make the most of the American pioneer life first detailed for most of us by Laura Ingalls Wilder. One reviewer says this story "makes an anonymous woman equal to the most celebrated hero of legend." Note that the Kindle version includes only the text of the novel. The paperback version includes 24 charcoal illustrations and highlights in a font created from Rosette's own handwriting. Now available: a companion short story - "Blizzard: A Story of Dakota Territory."
The Dance of Love
Angela Young - 2014
Against a backdrop of high Edwardian luxury, Natalie Edwardes is poised on the brink of adulthood and, in an age when a woman's destiny is decided by marriage, her beauty, wit and wealth would seem to guarantee her a glittering future. But, isolated by her father's position as a self-made man, Natalie has never felt at ease in a society bound by a maze of conventions. Heart, for her, will always rule head, and so it seems that an encounter with a dashing yet gentle artist-soldier contains all the seeds of her life's happiness. The dance of Natalie's life whirls her from the glittering ballrooms of London and the grand houses of Scotland and Devon, to the Scottish Highlands. But the strictures of polite society are far-reaching and Natalie's happiness is abruptly snatched away. She is forced to compromise her romantic ideals and it is only when the tragedy of the Titanic touches her life, years later, that she discovers what love really means and the heartrending choices it poses. Choices that even the cataclysmic events of 1914-1919 seem unlikely to challenge.
Secret Girl: A Memoir
Molly Bruce Jacobs - 2006
For one daughter, that secret would haunt her for years but ultimately compel her to take surprising risks and reap unbelievable rewards--the story of which forms the stunning narrative of this remarkable memoir.When Molly Bruce Jacobs, the family's eldest daughter, finds herself newly sober at the age of thirty-eight, she finally seeks out and comes face-to-face with this secret: Anne, a younger sister who was diagnosed at birth with hydrocephalus (water on the brain) and mental retardation, was institutionalized. Anne has never been home to visit, and Molly Jacobs has never seen her. Full of trepidation, she goes to meet her sister for the first time. As the book unfolds and the sisters grow close, Jacobs learns of the decades of life not shared and gains surprising insights about herself, including why she drank for most of her adult life. In addition, she gradually comes to understand that her parents' reasons for placing Anne in a state institution were far more complex than she'd ever imagined.
Travels With Boogie: 500 Mile Walkies and Boogie Up the River in One Volume
Mark Wallington - 1995
And they did it. Then, undaunted, they took on the treacherous waters of the Thames. Not exactly as Mark had planned, however: this time his companion was to be the delectable Jennifer - but she was held up at the office, and when Boogie was dropped off at the kennels the other dogs complained.Travels with Boogie is a witty and fascinating account of a mismatched couple and of the people they meet and places they visit.