Never been to a movie. Never played baseball with a real team. Never got over feeling guilty for the loss of his brother. But change is in the air. Billy discovers he has a natural talent for baseball, especially as a pitcher. Maybe, just maybe, there's more in store for him than life on the farm. But can Billy convince his father of that? Or is he destined to spend the rest of his life pitching nothing but hay?Teenager Billy Baggs is desperately needed on his family's struggling dairy farm, but he's also an extraordinarily gifted natural baseball player. How he struggles to reconcile his father's desire to keep him on the farm with his coach's interest in getting him on the field is at the heart of this ‘meaty story.… The complex characters grow and change in profoundly real ways.''K. ‘[With] flashes of humor, a wealth of lovingly recounted details evokes the difficult daily life on a small dairy farm.''Publishers Weekly. 1994 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA)1994 Books for the Teen Age (NY Public Library)1993 "Pick of the Lists" (ABA)

    He is an American. His torturer will stop at nothing to extract the information he requires. He, too, is an American.A Day and a Night and a Day is a Grand Inquisition for the twenty-first century, in which love, loyalty, reason, and truth are on trial, and morality hangs in the balance. It is the story of Augustus Rose, an unlikely operative in a terrorist network, and his interrogator, Harper, a ruthless ambassador for the darkest forces at work in our times.Beyond the law and without hope of escape or reprieve, Augustus endures an emotional and physical assault that brings his whole life under brutal scrutiny: his race, religion, politics, and past, the people he has loved, and the few he is still desperate to protect. Alone and certain of death, Augustus raises the only shield he has: memory.He remembers his outcast Euro-American mother, Juliet, whose erratic love was refuge from the unforgiving streets of Harlem in the 1950s; he recalls the strange solace of Elise Merkete, the ravaged vigilante who recruited him into the ranks of her underground army; he relives the cool touch of the young Spanish prostitute, In�s, perhaps the last female tenderness he's ever likely to know.Outshining them all is the memory of Selina, a stunning, troubled, and rebellious white New York aristocrat. Their epic, taboo love affair, begun in 1960s Manhattan, would yield a lifetime's worth of passion, heartbreak, and wanderlust, leading Augustus from Harlem to Greenwich Village, from El Salvador to Barcelona, from Morocco to a bleak British island where death seems his only companion.Dramatic, far-reaching, and beautifully written, A Day and a Night and a Day is both a piercing love story and a timely, harrowing evaluation of the shape the Western world is taking.

    . . is grounded by a shadow play of macabre references to horrors that ghost around the edges of the narrative, many eerily similar to some of the more infamous real life reports that have emerged in recent years."-- The Irish Times Combining the spirit of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim with a bawdy evisceration of hypocrisy in old-school Catholic education, The Brothers' Lot is a comic satire that tells the story of the Brothers of Godly Coercion School for Young Boys of Meager Means, a dilapidated Dickensian institution run by an assemblage of eccentric, insane, and often nasty celibate Brothers. The school is in decline and the Brothers hunger for a miracle to move their founder, the Venerable Saorseach O'Rahilly, along the path to Sainthood.When a possible miracle presents itself, the Brothers fervently seize on it with the help of the ethically pliant Diocesan Investigator, himself hungry for a miracle to boost his career. The school simultaneously comes under threat from strange outside forces. The harder the Brothers try to defend the school, the worse things seem to get. It takes an outsider, Finbar Sullivan, a young student newly arrived at the school, to see that the source of the threat may in fact lie inside the school itself. As the miracle unravels, the Brothers' efforts to preserve it unleash a disastrous chain of events.Tackling a serious subject from the oblique viewpoint of satire, The Brothers' Lot explores the culture that allowed abuses within church-run institutions in Ireland to go unchecked for decades.

    Her words inflamed the passions of sports lovers across the country, and her piece quickly became the newspaper's most e-mailed and talked-about article in the week it ran. The intense reaction of fans forced Heller to look inward, and to re-examine her feelings about winning and losing. Was she a "bandwagon" fan, as some branded her? A traitor? Confessions of a She-Fan is a witty, observant, and decidedly female look at the nature of the bond between fan and team. Jane Heller goes in search of answers. With her husband as her traveling partner, she literally follows the Bronx Bombers through the rest of their challenging 2007 season, hoping to score interviews with the players, watch every game in every city, and inject some excitement into her marriage. Through interactions with other fans, as well as members of the media covering the Yankees, plus game-by-game analyses, Heller learns personal life lessons about competition, loyalty, and acceptance--and about why baseball, like any truly romantic relationship, requires commitment, patience, and a deep, abiding love.

    Two men, aided by her father, hustle her mother away without a word, leaving a stunned Sarah staring after them. Thus begins Sarah’s journey into a world of secrets, a world of great responsibility and little guidance. Along the way, “The Blue Car,” set in western North Carolina in 1952, explores when to keep a promise and when to break it, and whether people can really change. Book club discussion questions included.

    For Lily and Jack, that moment comes when their baby daughter, home alone with Lily, pulls a pot of boiling water off the stove and suffers terrible burns. It is an accident, but the state suspects abuse and takes temporary custody of the child.To win her back, Lily and Jack must prove to strangers that they are good parents and that their daughter belongs with them and their two sons. They must convince others even as they struggle to once again believe it themselves...even as they begin to fall away from each other just when they most need to be together.Rachel Basch's remarkable debut is an eloquent and touching story about family and individuality, guilt and blame, and how love can fail us or save us, often to our great surprise. It is a book to be cherished, a rich novel that will linger in every reader's mind and heart.

    Now she returns to the eastern plains of Colorado, full of raw rage at herself and at the universe, yearning for the life she never lead and the daughter she left behind. As a levantona who has been running drugs and illegal immigrants once they’re beyond the US-Mexico border, she’s knowingly and even defiantly entered into a harsh and dangerous world. But suddenly her world has become darker than she can bear: The largest wildfire in Colorado history is blazing. Immigrants are dead. She’s haunted by the memory of a Mexican woman she couldn’t save and a lost Mexican girl she did. Traffickers – of both immigrants and drugs – are now hunting her down. But most of all, Tess is at the mercy of her own traumatized soul, and the weight of it is cracking her apart.Before completing the only courageous action she can think of, Tess must now face her dying mother, her sister, and her daughter, and most importantly, herself. This book broaches timely topics essential in the West—immigration, rural poverty, wildfires —with suspense and gritty wisdom as well as Pritchett’s trademark lyricism and grace. Like Libby, her sister and the central character of Pritchett’s novel Sky Bridge, Tess has her own coming-of-age, in a revelatory story of hard-earned transformation and redemption.

    On the fifth of July, RL and June go down to the river with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red to commemorate Taylor’s fiftieth and last birthday. Taylor was RL’s boyhood friend and June’s husband, but after eleven years, June, a childless hospice worker, finally declares she’s “nobody’s widow anymore.” Anxious for a new beginning, June considers selling her beloved house. RL, a divorced  empty-nester, faces a major change, too, when he agrees to lodge his college girlfriend, Betsy, while she undergoes chemotherapy. Caught between Betsy’s anguish and June’s hope, the cynical RL is brought face-to-face with his own sense of futility, and the longing to experience the kind of love that “knocks you down.” Set in Montana, reflecting the beauty of its landscape and the independence of its people, Everything is a shimmering novel about unexpected redemption by a writer of deep empathy and prodigious talents.

    On the mound is 32-year-old Sam Ward--it's his last chance to justify all he has sacrificed for this ultimate start. Behind the plate is aging umpire Ernie Kolacka, who has reasons to use his position to fix the game.

    A traveling salesman consigned to a late-night bus ride. A prison inmate stripped of everything but his pride. A teenage runaway. Mismatched lovers. In his debut collection of short fiction, award-winning novelist Craig Lancaster returns to the terrain of his Montana home and takes on the notion of separation in its many forms - from comfort zones, from ideas, from people, from security, from fears. These ten stories delve into small towns and big cities, into love and despair, into what drives us and what scares us, peeling back the layers of our humanity with every pag

    The Glanville clan includes Edwin, a retired bishop who has lost his faith; his wife Marta, a controversial anthropologist and child of the Warsaw Ghetto; their son, Clement, a celebrated gay painter traumatized by the death of his twin; and their daughter, Susannah, a music publicist recovering from an affair with a convicted murderer. Each of them must face down a personal demon--Clement's work and reputation are violently attacked and his privacy is shattered, Susannah's exploration of the kabbalah transports her into the closed world of Chassidic Jews and a seemingly impossible love, and Edwin's illness forces Marta to confront the horrors of her past. These memorable figures are portrayed with wit, wisdom, and shattering emotional power.

    For twenty-five years, they've gone their separate ways and lived separate lives. But when Sara's fall breaks her hip and leaves her unable to care for herself, her daughter is forced to return to Texas. Charlotte’s short-term care-giving plan is dashed when she realizes her difficult mother needs long-term care. While Sara struggles to regain her independence, Charlotte grapples with the impossible task of juggling a high-pressure job, a rebellious teenage daughter, and a slightly demented mother. The Women of Fossil Ridge Series is a heartwarming addition to the small town, generational series of favorite authors like Ann B. Ross, Jan Karon, and Beth Hoffman. Gentry’s small-town sagas are a masterful peek into what it takes to resuscitate a mother-daughter relationship. Series sparkles with humor, heart, and southern charm. ~Amazon Reviewer Gentry is one to watch. ~RT Reviews Books in the Women of Fossil Ridge series: #1 Flying Fossils #2 Finally Free #3 First Frost If you loved FLYING FOSSILS, you'll enjoy Gentry's Mt. Hope Southern Adventures series. Out of the dust of West Texas comes another set of heartwarming books that will have you laughing until you cry. Books in Mt. Hope Southern Adventures series: #1 Walking Shoes #2 Shoes to Fill #3 Dancing Shoes #4 Baby Shoes

    A fictional town full of very real people who survive the attack of Hurricane Hugo and then find their bearings in the aftermath—often in wild and hilarious ways. The days leading up to the impending disaster are not at all unusual—no portents of disaster, no signs of impending calamity. Bryce works his night shift at the hot dog factory, Isaac drives the bus to school, Evelyn attends a funeral. But when the electricity fails in the middle of the night on September 21, 1989, it marks the moment when everything will change: Hugo has arrived.The storm builds, the wind whips by faster and faster, and interpersonal dramas, grudges, and rivalries are dredged up along with the flotsam and debris. Meanwhile, flood markers, painted red, track the height of the water from past rainstorms, and as the creek level rises higher than ever before, so do the emotions of the townspeople.Alternating between weather forecasts and short stories, Floodmarkers is an exquisitely crafted day-in-the-life of a town. And as Nic Brown has us look bravely at the eye of the storm, he cleverly shows us that human nature can stir up a spectacular tempest all its own.

    In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of postwar Jewish life, took on very different material—the story of a superbly gifted "natural" at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era—and invested it with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work. Four decades later, Alfred Kazin's comment still holds true: "Malamud has done something which—now that he has done it!—looks as if we have been waiting for it all our lives. He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology."

    Modern suburban life has been getting him down and this is the last straw. To avoid following in his own father’s missteps, Bob is suddenly desperate to reconnect with his wife and his distant, distracted children. And he's looking for any guidance he can get.Bob Coffen soon learns that the wisest words come from the most unexpected places, from characters that are always more than what they appear to be: a magician/marriage counselor, a fast-food drive-thru attendant/phone-sex operator, and a janitor/guitarist of a French KISS cover band. Can these disparate voices inspire Bob to fight for his family? To fight for his place in the world?A call-to-arms for those who have ever felt beaten down by life, Fight Song is a quest for happiness in a world in which we are increasingly losing control. It is the exciting new novel by one of the most surprising and original writers of his generation.