It tells the story of Bailey, from her own viewpoint, who begins her life in circumstances beyond her control. She longs for love and to live in home where she will be cared for. This short story follows her adventures from her start and through the trials she faces to reach her Forever Home. This is the first book of a new series that will introduce you to Bailey and each of her friends and how they all find their way home. I hope you enjoy her journey.

    Marcus wants nothing more than to indulge in drink, drugs and women.But when he meets the plot-holders on the Butterfly Lane allotments--Sophia, a charming, but troubled, woman in the midst of a spiritual crisis; Alex, his fiery, Greek neighbour, who covets both Marcus’s plot and a mysterious book that belonged to his grandfather; and Benjamin, a shadowy recluse--the reason for his inheritance becomes clear.

    Usually when I tell people that they laugh and ask me what my real name is. I just look them dead on and repeat, 'Free.' I left my old name behind with my old life; shed both of them like a useless layer of skin. When I stepped free of that world, I took the name Free. It is my real name. I picked it myself. What could be more real than that?"Since leaving home at the age of 18, Free has traveled the country searching for home. Her travels afford a variety of experiences, from following the Grateful Dead to waitressing in Chicago to selling jewelry in New Orleans' French Market, but nothing seems to quell her sense of unrest. All the while her estranged brother Alfie is in her thoughts. Once she finds him, perhaps she'll finally feel at home. But her world is filled with bad choices and unsavory characters, and she finds that freedom sometimes comes at a cost. The reader will feel as if they are traveling right alongside Free in this moving coming-of-age story.

    These stories are told with the freshness and directness one has come to expect of Michael Anthony.

    The main storyline follows Zack Hara, a young Japanese American searching for an emotional life while traveling in Japan. Zack finds an ally in a professor and underground poet who introduces him to the concept of mono no aware, roughly translated as the emotive essence of things, or the sadness in beauty. The professor, grieving for a missing daughter, assigns Zack a set of mysterious tasks. Zack’s search for self-discovery turns into a search for the professor’s missing daughter, and draws him into the tragic phenomenon of suicide clubs.

    Her novels and short stories speak to women and men about their most intense relationships and heartfelt feelings.In this collection of five short stories and a novella, Ms. Godwin is at her best. In the title novella, "Mr. Bedford," a young would-be writer spends time in England under the strange and watchful eye of a rather unusual elderly couple; in "Amanuensis," a charming college student cares for a famous but blocked novelist, with unpredictable results; and in "The Angry Year," a rebellious student is drawn to two different kinds of men until she discovers what she has been running to and from.

    A yacht races to outrun a tsunami. A young man jailed on a drug charge forms a relationship with his cellmate that is by turns tender and brutal. A family buys a rural slaughterhouse, and tensions with their religious neighbors quickly escalate. A teen raised by his eccentric gay father, a Turkish immigrant, finds his life fractured by violence. A fictionalized Coretta Scott King, surveilled and harassed by the FBI, considers the costs of her life with her husband. Here Is What You Do is a bravura, far-ranging collection, its stories linked by sorrow and latent hope, each one drilling toward its characters’ darkest emotional centers. In muscularly robust prose, with an unfailing eye for human drives and frailties, Chris Dennis captures the raw need, desire, cruelty, and promise that animate our lives.

    But missing him is soon replaced with the challenges and surprises right in front of her. What is her mother hiding? Why has her grandfather disappeared from their lives? Unraveling the mysteries brings about unexpected discoveries and connections, ultimately leading her to know herself and understand what matters most.

    Ana, a struggling voice-over actress, is an admirably brave and recklessly impulsive woman who does everything in her power to care for her little girl. With no other family or friends her own age, Ana eclipses Mara’s entire world. They take turns caring for each other—in ways big and small. Their arrangement begins to unravel when Ana becomes involved with a civilian rebel group attempting to undermine the city's torturous Police Chief, who rules over 1980s Rio de Janeiro with terrifying brutality. Ana makes decisions that indelibly change their shared life. When Mara is forced to escape, she emigrates to California where she finds employment as a caregiver to a young woman dying of stomach cancer. It’s here that she begins to grapple with her turbulent past and starts to uncover vital truths—about her mother, herself, and what it means to truly take care of someone. Told with vivid imagery and subtle poignancy, The Caregiver is a moving and profound story that asks us to investigate who we are—as children and parents, immigrants and citizens, and ultimately, humans looking for vital connectivity.

    The hoard is endless, stacked into every room in the house, teetering in piles along the landing and forming a scree up the stairs. It is all part of Clifford’s waste-not way of thinking in which everything, no matter how broken or obscure, can be re-cycled or re-purposed into something useful or, if kept long enough, will one day be valuable. He had believed in his vision as ardently as any mystic in his holy revelation but now, without the clear projection of his vision to light it up for her as what it would be, it appears to Maisie more grimly than ever as what it is: junk. As Maisie disassembles his stash she is forced to confront the issues which drove her husband to squirrel away other people’s rubbish; after all, she knows virtually nothing about his life before they met. Finally, in the last bastion of his accumulation, she discovers the key to his hoarding and understands – much too late – the man she married. Then, with empty rooms in a house which is too big for her, she must ask herself: what next?

    The police warned drivers to stay off the roads. Families huddled inside their homes, wondering if they would lose power. In the morning everything was covered in a glittering layer of frosting, including the body of a young man found off to the side of a rural highway without a jacket, shoes or socks. With no identification on the body the police come up empty-handed. The small town raise enough donations to hire an investigator. Darren Holloway is known for solving missing children cases. But not missing like this, where there seems to be no happy ending in sight, not for the frozen boy, or for Darren’s crumbling marriage. In a large city to the south, two women are unknowingly connected to the mystery of the frozen boy found in the field. Their lives intersect through minor touch points, but they are more connected than they realize. Their past clings to them, unwilling to let them go.

     *Includes a free extract from Katherine Heiny’s debut novel, Standard Deviation* 'Just as Jane Austen believed that four people cannot comfortably walk abreast, Charlene believes that three people cannot amicably move one person's belongings. At least not when two of the people used to be married to each other, and the marriage resulted in a bitter divorce in order for one of them to marry the third person' When Forrest's ex-wife Barbara calls on him to help her move out of the home they once shared, his second wife Charlie finds herself carrying not only dozens of boxes, but also the weight of their shared past. Barbara and Charlie first met twenty years ago when they volunteered at a suicide crisis hotline, and one night in particular is seared into Charlie's memory…From the author of Standard Deviation comes a wryly tender story of crises and cardboard boxes; of marriage and moving on.

    Angela and Brendan are racing towards a wedding day that is increasingly tainted by doubts. Yana runs to free herself from the darkness of the past and to remember her missing brother. Cathy thinks about the secret she has been unable to share. Running takes Maurice past his daughter's house, the place he is not allowed to enter. Over the nine weeks unexpected friendships are forged, challenges faced and by the time of their final run together all will grasp a new commitment to life itself.

    

    This is the story of how he succeeds in getting it all, and what it costs him in the end.Narrated by an unlikely literary legend, How I Became A Famous Novelist pinballs from the post-college slums of Boston, to the fear-drenched halls of Manhattan's publishing houses, from the gloomy purity of Montana’s foremost writing workshop to the hedonistic hotel bars of the Sunset Strip. The horrifying, hilarious tale of how Pete’s “pile of garbage” called The Tornado Ashes Club became the most talked about, blogged about, read, admired, and reviled novel in America will change everything you think you know about literature, appearance, truth, beauty, and those people out there, somewhere in America, who still care about books.