Her only worries are schoolwork, keeping up with her best friend and whether she should sleep with her boyfriend. Then her adoptive father disappears one winter's day. As she tries to find out why he left her, her past unravels in front of her.

    But they struggled to cope with the devastating news their daughter Emmie has incurable cancer. It feels like their world – and their relationship – has come crashing down. They must do everything to support their little girl, but can they stop their marriage falling apart? Unbeknownst to her parents, Emmie is on a mission. She is determined to make them see what brought them together in the first place – and make them fall in love all over again. One Last Wish is a spellbinding, unputdownable and heartbreaking read, perfect for fans of Alice Peterson, Amanda Prowse or Adele Parks. Praise for Ella Harper ‘A great book to curl up with’ Daily Mail ‘Warm, perceptive and razor sharp. It’s everything you want from a novel’ Veronica Henry ‘You won’t be able to stop reading’ Heat Magazine‘Poignant, heart-wrenching, and wonderfully uplifting too. A remarkable debut full of well-crafted characters that stayed with me long after the last page’ Alexandra Brown‘Move over authors, a new queen is in town! Ella Harper has written a book that will have you gripped from page one to the very last. This is a story that will contend well with Jojo Moyes’ Me Before You and Cecelia Ahern's P.S. I Love You’ Book Shelf‘A beautiful and moving read that had me hooked from the start. I couldn’t put it down until I knew what happened!’ Jill Loves to Read‘A bittersweet, heart-wrenching story that will make you think a lot and wonder what you would do’ Lost in Chick-litElla Harper learned foreign languages, and imagined she might eventually get a glamorous job speaking French. After climbing her way up the banking ladder, Ella started idly mapping out the beginnings of a novel on an old laptop. When she realised her characters were more real to her than dividends and corporate actions ever could be, she left her job to become a writer.

    Quinn must learn how to exist in his mother's troubled world, without being consumed by her selfishness. Written with fervor and affection for a wounded past, Lyla is an intense and personal epic about a restless woman, and the children caught in her spurring draft. Set during the Great Depression, on the upper coast of Florida, this touching story is about growing up in an achingly anguished household, and finding a way to survive. A stirring memoir that delivers the reader to a sepia-tinted world that is heartbreaking, at times shocking, and triumphant.

    has dared to take on a difficult, grief-stricken period of English history, and done so with sensitivity and understanding; EARTH AND HEAVEN is the clever, compelling result' The Times

    With a fluency of tone that will surprise even his devoted readers, he captures both bewildering horror and heartrending tenderness with an absorbing, compassionate authority.We warm to these newcomers—as to all Russo's characters—almost despite ourselves. A jaded Hollywood moviemaker uncovers a decades-old flame he never knew he'd harbored. A precocious fifth grader puzzles over life, love and baseball as he watches his parents' marriage dissolve. Another child is forced into a harrowing cross-country escape whose actual purpose he learns only after the fact. An elderly couple rediscovers the power, and the misery, of their relationship during a long-awaited retreat to a resort island. And in the title story, a septuagenarian nun invades the narrator's college writing workshop with an incredible saga.

    In 'The Southern Cross, ' Chanel, a girl of easy virtue and dubious reputation, chronicles her cruise around the Caribbean with three Atlanta developers. 'I may be old, but I'm not dead, ' begins Alice Scully, scandalizing her retirement-home writers' group in 'The Hap Memories Club.' And prim, old-maid Sarah is titillated by the housekeeper's horrific account of her daughter's 'blue wedding.' In 'The Bubba Stories, ' Charlene Christian explains, 'I made Bubba up in the spring of 1963 in order to increase my popularity with my girlfriends'; but this legendary brother takes on a life of his own. Paula's damaged brother Johnny, in the title story, is 'writing a new kind of book, ' constructing another narrative of his tragic life. Brothers, sisters, and friends appear in these stories as the narrators' other selves, offering other possibilities. Here we have news of the spirit, indeed: stories about longing and despair and imagination and grace, about love in all its strange and shifting forms.

    Its twenty-six-year-old author, Kent Wascom, was awarded the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for fiction, and this first novel shows the kind of talent rarely seen in any novelist, no matter their age.The Blood of Heaven is the story of Angel Woolsack, a preacher’s son, who flees the hardscrabble life of his itinerant father, falls in with a charismatic highwayman, then settles with his adopted brothers on the rough frontier of West Florida, where American settlers are carving their place out of lands held by the Spaniards and the French. The novel moves from the bordellos of Natchez, where Angel meets his love Red Kate to the Mississippi River plantations, where the brutal system of slave labor is creating fantastic wealth along with terrible suffering, and finally to the back rooms of New Orleans among schemers, dreamers, and would-be revolutionaries plotting to break away from the young United States and create a new country under the leadership of the renegade founding father Aaron Burr.The Blood of Heaven is a remarkable portrait of a young man seizing his place in a violent new world, a moving love story, and a vivid tale of ambition and political machinations that brilliantly captures the energy and wildness of a young America where anything was possible. It is a startling debut.

    Ranging from the 19th to the 20th centuries, writers include James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, Richard Edward Connell, Henri Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Jack London, Henri Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant and Edgar Allan Poe.

    This book brings together some of his nastiest and most irreverent pieces. Witty, sharp and brutally honest, this collection is certain to delight and provoke readers of all ages.

     The Cast of Characters includes …Tama...A beautiful fugitive determined to live free.Elinore...An active abolitionist on a mission to find happiness.Julee...A girl with no past who seeks a future among the Indians. Hakan...A proud man entrusted with the survival of his people.Thorne...A man obsessed with claiming what he owns.From the snow-covered mountains of North Carolina to the untamed wilds of Indian Territory, A Thousand Steps takes readers on a perilous quest for freedom, truth, and love.

    But when her ambitious, politically minded grown son, Theopolis, is murdered, Mariah--no stranger to loss--finds her world once more breaking apart. How could this happen? Who wanted him dead? Mariah's journey to uncover the truth leads her to unexpected people--including George Tole, a recent arrival to town, fleeing a difficult past of his own--and forces her to confront the truths of her own past. Brimming with the vivid prose and historical research that has won Robert Hicks recognition as a "master storyteller" (San Francisco Chronicle).

    Many years later, a couple sailing around the world take refuge on an uncharted island. Although they believe the tiny atoll to be uninhabited, it is actually home to a mysterious woman who has been stranded there for more than forty years. As that woman ponders whether to stay hidden or step back into society, a tempestuous storm threatens to change the course of all their lives.

    The Islamic Revolution is just around the corner, as is a massive solar eclipse. In this epic novel set in the small Iranian city of Naishapur, a retired judge and his wife, Bibi, grow apples, plums, peaches, and sour cherries, as well as manage several generations of family members. The days here are marked by long, elaborate lunches on the terrace and arguments about the corrupt monarchy in Iran and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. And yet life in the orchard continues. An uncle develops into a powerful cleric. A young nephew goes to university, hoping to lead the fight for a new Iran and marry his childhood sweetheart. Another nephew surrenders to opium, while his widowed father dreams of a life in the West. Told through a host of vivid, unforgettable characters that range from servants to elderly friends of the family, To Keep the Sun Alive is the kind of rich, compelling story that not only informs the past, but raises questions about political and religious extremism today.

    A few boyfriends and one abortion later she falls in love with Salim, the proud and elegant Pakistani with eyes like treacle. East meets West in a passionate mixed marriage. However, Marianne knows little of the Islamic view of motherhood. When his wife proves unfaithful, Salim reasons that she is morally incapable of bringing up her children and kidnaps them while she is at work...

    Orphan, soldier, diplomat, spy, lover. And chef.This is his story.We meet Jean-Marie d’Aumout as a penniless orphan eating beetles by the side of a road. His fate is changed after an unlikely encounter finds him patronage and he is sent to military academy. Despite his frugal roots, and thanks to it and courage in great measure, he grows up to become a diplomat and spy.Rising through the ranks of eighteenth-century French society, he feasts with lords, ladies and eventually kings, at the Palace of Versailles itself.Passionate love, political intrigue and international adventure abound in Jean-Marie’s life, but his drive stems from a single obsession: the pursuit of the perfect taste. Three-Snake Bouillabaisse, Pickled Wolf’s Heart and Flamingo Tongue are just some of the delicacies he devours on his journey toward the ultimate feast.But beyond the palace walls, revolution is in the air and the country is clamouring with hunger of a different kind.