Sympathetic but critical, serious yet witty, the book shows a country in which the familiar becomes strange, and the strange familiar.

    Beat him to death with a tree branch after he threatened to rape her. But what started as self-defense became problematic for two reasons. First, she killed Robert Sims after he’d been rendered completely defenseless. And second, she inadvertently left her fingerprints at the scene. Allie is young, beautiful, the smartest person in any room. But she’s also been diagnosed as clinically insane. As her past catches up with her and her marriage starts to crumble, Allie is determined to survive at all costs. Size Matters is a taut, compelling novel that teaches us never to underestimate a woman with nothing to lose. PRELIMINARY REVIEWS: “Size Matters is so full of twists and turns and surprises I couldn’t have flipped the pages faster if you paid me! This novel surprised and delighted and kept me shaking my head time and again. Fans of Donovan Creed should be aware that he and Callie make a brief appearance that furthers their saga.” “‘I’ve done bad things,’ says Allie McPherson, ‘but that doesn’t make me a bad person.’ Well, that’s one opinion!” “This book is crazy! There are twists and turns on virtually every page! While I consider myself an expert on Locke novels, I have to admit he took me on a wild ride that made me guess wrong every single time.” “Size Matters is a cross between Alfred Hitchcock and Quentin Tarantino. From start to finish I was shocked, surprised, and hopelessly entertained.”

    Jo Marchant's book can begin to heal it. For at least 20,000 years, we have led not just an earthly existence but a cosmic one. Celestial cycles drove every aspect of our daily lives. Our innate relationship with the stars shaped who we are--our art, religious beliefs, social status, scientific advances, and even our biology. But over the last few centuries we have separated ourselves from the universe that surrounds us. It's a disconnect with a dire cost.Our relationship to the stars and planets has moved from one of awe, wonder and superstition to one where technology is king--the cosmos is now explored through data on our screens, not by the naked eye observing the natural world. Indeed, in most countries modern light pollution obscures much of the night sky from view. Jo Marchant's spellbinding parade of the ways different cultures celebrated the majesty and mysteries of the night sky is a journey to the most awe inspiring view you can ever see--looking up on a clear dark night. That experience and the thoughts it has engendered have radically shaped human civilization across millennia. The cosmos is the source of our greatest creativity in art, in science, in life.To show us how, Jo Marchant takes us to the Hall of the Bulls in the caves at Lascaux in France, and to the summer solstice at a 5,000-year-old tomb at New Grange in England. We discover Chumash cosmology and visit medieval monks grappling with the nature of time and Tahitian sailors navigating by the stars. We discover how light reveals the chemical composition of the sun, and we are with Einstein as he works out that space and time are one and the same. A four-billion-year-old meteor inspires a search for extraterrestrial life. The cosmically liberating, summary revelation is that star-gazing made us human.

    In The Atheist Manifesto, Christopher Hitchens presents his case against religion and for mental liberty. Hitchens argues that religion is not merely unnecessary for morality, but actually antithetical to it. In his unwaveringly logical analysis, Hitchens dismantles the moral high ground claimed by religion, and constructs a philosophical platform of rationality, morality, and liberty for all humankind.

    S. Lewis is a profound and perhaps the most respected Christian apologist because his belief was so hard-won. This collection of verse, written immediately after he returned from the battlefields of World War I in 1919, offers penetrating insight into the psyche of a young man struggling with traumatic wartime experiences and the crisis of faith they engendered. By turns angry, bitter, and melancholy, these poems constitute a provocative document of Lewis's journey from atheism through agnosticism and on to conviction. Irish writer CLIVE STAPLES ("JACK") LEWIS (1898-1963) was born in Belfast. A volunteer in the British Army during World War I, he served in the trenches of France, and returned to study and teach at Oxford University; he later accepted a post at Cambridge University, retiring only months before his death. His best-known works are The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956), Mere Christianity (1952), and his autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955).

    The soul is the key to our lives, binding our heart, our mind, and our spirit together. Shouldn't you get pretty clear on exactly what the soul is? And how to care for it? Taken from John Ortberg's book Soul Keeping, this booklet reveals what the soul's greatest need is, now and for eternity.Have you ever thought about why your soul is hurting and if that could be standing in the way of your spiritual growth? Ortberg writes that once your soul has been properly cared for, you will find your way back to God from hopelessness, depression, relationship struggles, and lack of fulfillment. Jesus said we could find rest for our souls. Ortberg points us in that direction.

    A practising lawyer, Wade is forced to confront truths that challenge his most basic notions of justice and good.Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Ford County.

    Berry talks to the reader as one would talk to a next-door neighbor: never preachy, he comes across as someone offering sound advice. He speaks with sadness of the greedy consumption of this country's natural resources and the grim consequences Americans must face if current economic practices do not change drastically. In the end, these essays offer rays of hope in an otherwise bleak forecast of America's future. Berry's program presents convincing steps for America's agricultural and cultural survival.

    Half of all species could disappear by the end of the century, and scientists now concede that most of America’s endangered animals will survive only if conservationists keep rigging the world around them in their favor. So Mooallem ventures into the field, often taking his daughter with him, to move beyond childlike fascination and make those creatures feel more real. Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it—from Thomas Jefferson’s celebrations of early abundance to the turn-of the-last-century origins of the teddy bear to the whale-loving hippies of the 1970s. In America, Wild Ones discovers, wildlife has always inhabited the terrain of our imagination as much as the actual land.The journey is framed by the stories of three modern-day endangered species: the polar bear, victimized by climate change and ogled by tourists outside a remote northern town; the little-known Lange’s metalmark butterfly, foundering on a shred of industrialized land near San Francisco; and the whooping crane as it’s led on a months-long migration by costumed men in ultralight airplanes. The wilderness that Wild Ones navigates is a scrappy, disorderly place where amateur conservationists do grueling, sometimes preposterous-looking work; where a marketer maneuvers to control the polar bear’s image while Martha Stewart turns up to film those beasts for her show on the Hallmark Channel. Our most comforting ideas about nature unravel. In their place, Mooallem forges a new and affirming vision of the human animal and the wild ones as kindred creatures on an imperfect planet.With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without the easy moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalism’s older guard, Wild Ones merges reportage, science, and history into a humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and bring a life into, a broken world.

    Now, Decker returns in a spectacular new thriller . . . THE LAST MILEConvicted murderer Melvin Mars is counting down the last hours before his execution--for the violent killing of his parents twenty years earlier--when he's granted an unexpected reprieve. Another man has confessed to the crime.Amos Decker, newly hired on an FBI special task force, takes an interest in Mars's case after discovering the striking similarities to his own life: Both men were talented football players with promising careers cut short by tragedy. Both men's families were brutally murdered. And in both cases, another suspect came forward, years after the killing, to confess to the crime. A suspect who may or may not have been telling the truth.The confession has the potential to make Melvin Mars--guilty or not--a free man. Who wants Mars out of prison? And why now?But when a member of Decker's team disappears, it becomes clear that something much larger--and more sinister--than just one convicted criminal's life hangs in the balance. Decker will need all of his extraordinary brainpower to stop an innocent man from being executed.

    Unfortunately he died suddenly at age fifty-two just as his book of blessings, To Bless the Space Between Us, was being published. The loss of his powerfully wise and lyrical voice has been profoundly missed, but his many readers are given a special opportunity to revisit John in a new book based on a series of papers he wrote on the elements of water, stone, air, and fire, now published here for the first time. O'Donohue's readers know him as both a spiritual guide and a poet, and in this work he exhibits both qualities, sharing his Celtic heritage and his love for his native landscape in the west of Ireland. As O'Donohue explores a range of themes relating to the way we live our lives today, he reveals how the energy and rhythm of the natural world--its innocence and creativity, its power and splendor--hold profound lessons for us all. With a foreword written by his beloved brother, Pat, this illuminating book is an inspired reflection on the ancient wisdom of the earth.

    Fifty international words for snow – explored by an award-winning writer – that will enchant readers this Christmas.

    Three Novels by Paulo Coelho published by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers

    Exploring nature as a tool for learning about the spiritual self, this title offers a narrative of the author's wilderness adventures, and provides exercises for turning off the conscious mind and achieving enlightenment.

    This is Coyote's country--a landscape of the imagination, where nothing is as it appears.