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Second Chances by Lincoln Cole


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The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley


Hannah Tinti - 2017
    There, in his late wife's hometown, Hawley finds work as a fisherman, while Loo struggles to fit in at school and grows curious about her mother's mysterious death. Haunting them both are twelve scars Hawley carries on his body, from twelve bullets in his criminal past; a past that eventually spills over into his daughter's present, until together they must face a reckoning yet to come. This father-daughter epic weaves back and forth through time and across America, from Alaska to the Adirondacks. Both a coming-of-age novel and a literary thriller, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley explores what it means to be a hero, and the cost we pay to protect the people we love most.

The Dreamers


Karen Thompson Walker - 2019
    She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics who carry her away, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. Then a second girl falls asleep, and then another, and panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. As the number of cases multiplies, classes are canceled, and stores begin to run out of supplies. A quarantine is established. The National Guard is summoned. Mei, an outsider in the cliquish hierarchy of dorm life, finds herself thrust together with an eccentric, idealistic classmate. Two visiting professors try to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. A father succumbs to the illness, leaving his daughters to fend for themselves. And at the hospital, a new life grows within a college girl, unbeknownst to her—even as she sleeps. A psychiatrist, summoned from Los Angeles, attempts to make sense of the illness as it spreads through the town. Those infected are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, more than has ever been recorded. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what?

Flat Water Tuesday


Ron Irwin - 2013
    Despite having long ago buried the memories of the brutal year he spent at the elite Fenton School in Connecticut as a postgraduate rower, Carrey finds that those days now return to haunt him.The Fenton School Boat Club’s top rowing team, called the God Four, is legendary. But the price that they pay for a shot at glory will scar each member of Carrey’s team far into adulthood.Colin Payne, the Massachusetts blue-blood; Jumbo, the good natured giant; John Wadsworth the preppy lawyer-to-be; Ruth Anderson, the Yale-bound coxswain; and Rob Carrey, the scholarship athlete from Niccalsetti, New York — all of them are forever bound to one another by the terrible cost of victory. Over one tumultuous week, Rob Carrey will learn that he cannot leave the past in his wake.

Foe


Iain Reid - 2018
    Not out here. We never have. In Iain Reid’s second haunting, philosophical puzzle of a novel, set in the near-future, Junior and Henrietta live a comfortable, solitary life on their farm, far from the city lights, but in close quarters with each other. One day, a stranger from the city arrives with alarming news: Junior has been randomly selected to travel far away from the farm...very far away. The most unusual part? Arrangements have already been made so that when he leaves, Henrietta won't have a chance to miss him, because she won't be left alone—not even for a moment. Henrietta will have company. Familiar company. Told in Reid’s sharp and evocative style, Foe examines the nature of domestic relationships, self-determination, and what it means to be (or not to be) a person. An eerily entrancing page-turner, it churns with unease and suspense from the first words to its shocking finale.

The Magician


D.A. Pupa - 2014
    A serial killer takes advantage of the night's ferocity and inflicts his own damage. The madman then disappears leaving a famed F.B.I. agent broken in the process. Frank Sorello retires from the Bureau only to be drawn back into the game after a bestselling novel by a new author raises suspicions about details inside the book. Is the homicidal maniac announcing his return or is it purely a coincidence? The intrigue builds as a young man with an intellect rivaling that of Einstein and Da Vinci is tragically connected to the Bureau's top agent. As the investigation is renewed, the murders begin once again. While the mystery unravels no one is truly safe; neither the gated communities of Hollywood nor the hallowed grounds of an Ivy League University provide refuge from what lies waiting in the shadows. The suspense mounts as the hunt gets ever more personal when the agent's current romantic interest becomes a target. Sorello vows to put an end to the killer's reign in this fast paced thriller . . . but the killer has other plans.

Manhattan Lockdown: A Novel


Paul Batista - 2016
    Suddenly multiple explosions rock the entire building. This is not an accident, not a gas leak, but a heinous act of terrorism. Among the injured is the mayor himself, and although he survives, the woman he loves does not. And the terrorism does not stop there. As the city’s other iconic sites are targeted, the mayor throws Manhattan into lockdown. In the chaos that ensues, law enforcement groups converge on New York City. The FBI, Homeland Security, the armed forces, even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President, come to the aid of the New York City Police Department. Amidst this massive joint effort, only New York City Police Commissioner Gina Carbone is closing in on the terrorists. Her tactics well outside legal bounds, her cell operating in total secrecy, Carbone takes vigilantism to a new level. Will her illicit actions succeed—or plunge the city into further catastrophe?Perfect for fans of Nelson DeMille’s John Corey While Manhattan Lockdown is a standalone novel, here is the publication order of Paul Batista’s legal thrillers:Death’s Witness Extraordinary Rendition The Borzoi Killings (Raquel Rematti Legal Thriller Series #1)Manhattan Lockdown The Warriors (Raquel Rematti Legal Thriller Series #2)Accusation (Raquel Rematti Legal Thriller Series #3) —coming in March 2022

The Invisible Ones


Stef Penney - 2011
    It has been seven years since she disappeared, and nobody said a word. Now, following the death of his wife, her father Leon feels compelled to find her. Rumour had it she ran off when her baby boy was born with the family's genetic disorder. Leon is not so sure. He wants to know the truth and he hires a private investigator to discover it - Ray Lovell. Ray starts to delve deeper, but his investigation is hampered by the very people who ought to be helping him - the Jankos. He cannot understand their reluctance to help. Why don't they want to find Rose Janko?

A Theatre for Dreamers


Polly Samson - 2020
    The world is dancing on the edge of revolution, and nowhere more so than on the Greek island of Hydra, where a circle of poets, painters and musicians live tangled lives, ruled by the writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston, troubled king and queen of bohemia. Forming within this circle is a triangle: its points the magnetic, destructive writer Axel Jensen, his dazzling wife Marianne Ihlen, and a young Canadian poet named Leonard Cohen. Into their midst arrives teenage Erica, with little more than a bundle of blank notebooks and her grief for her mother. Settling on the periphery of this circle, she watches, entranced and disquieted, as a paradise unravels. Burning with the heat and light of Greece, A Theatre for Dreamers is a spellbinding novel about utopian dreams and innocence lost – and the wars waged between men and women on the battlegrounds of genius.

I Have Lost My Way


Gayle Forman - 2018
    After the three of them collide in Central Park, they slowly reveal the parts of their past that they haven't been able to confront, and together, they find their way back to who they're supposed to be.Told over the course of a single day from three different perspectives, Gayle Forman's newest novel about the power of friendship and being true to who you are is filled with the elegant prose that her fans have come to know and love.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane


Neil Gaiman - 2013
    A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.

The Devil Crept In


Ania Ahlborn - 2017
    They’re well aware that the first forty-eight hours are critical and after that, the odds usually point to a worst-case scenario. And despite Stevie Clark’s youth, he knows that, too; he’s seen the cop shows. He knows what each ticking moment may mean for Jude, his cousin and best friend.That, and there was that boy, Max Larsen...the one from years ago, found dead after also disappearing under mysterious circumstances. And then there were the animals: pets gone missing out of yards. For years, the residents of Deer Valley have murmured about these unsolved crimes…and that a killer may still be lurking around their quiet town. Now, fear is reborn—and for Stevie, who is determined to find out what really happened to Jude, the awful truth may be too horrifying to imagine.

June


Miranda Beverly-Whittemore - 2016
    Jude, Ohio, mourning the loss of the woman who raised her—her grandmother, June. But a knock on the door forces her out of isolation. Cassie has been named the sole heir to legendary matinee idol Jack Montgomery's vast fortune. How did Jack Montgomery know her name? Could he have crossed paths with her grandmother all those years ago? What other shocking secrets could June’s once-stately mansion hold?Soon Jack’s famous daughters come knocking, determined to wrestle Cassie away from the inheritance they feel is their due. Together, they all come to discover the true reasons for June’s silence about that long-ago summer, when Hollywood came to town, and June and Jack’s lives were forever altered by murder, blackmail, and betrayal. As this page-turner shifts deftly between the past and present, Cassie and her guests will be forced to reexamine their legacies, their definition of family, and what it truly means to love someone, steadfastly, across the ages.

Black Swan Green


David Mitchell - 2006
    But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys’ games on a frozen lake; of “nightcreeping” through the summer backyards of strangers; of the tabloid-fueled thrills of the Falklands War and its human toll; of the cruel, luscious Dawn Madden and her power-hungry boyfriend, Ross Wilcox; of a certain Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, an elderly bohemian emigré who is both more and less than she appears; of Jason’s search to replace his dead grandfather’s irreplaceable smashed watch before the crime is discovered; of first cigarettes, first kisses, first Duran Duran LPs, and first deaths; of Margaret Thatcher’s recession; of Gypsies camping in the woods and the hysteria they inspire; and, even closer to home, of a slow-motion divorce in four seasons.Pointed, funny, profound, left-field, elegiac, and painted with the stuff of life, Black Swan Green is David Mitchell’s most subtlest and effective achievement to date.

The Tenth Circle


Jodi Picoult - 2006
    She's also the light of her father, Daniel's life -- a straight-A student; a pretty, popular freshman in high school; a girl who's always seen her father as a hero. That is, until her world is turned upside down with a single act of violence. Suddenly everything Trixie has believed about her family -- and herself -- seems to be a lie. Could the boyfriend who once made Trixie wild with happiness have been the one to end her childhood forever? She says that he is, and that is all it takes to make Daniel, a seemingly mild-mannered comic book artist with a secret tumultuous past he has hidden even from his family, venture to hell and back to protect his daughter. With The Tenth Circle, Jodi Picoult offers her most powerful chronicle yet as she explores the unbreakable bond between parent and child, and questions whether you can reinvent yourself in the course of a lifetime -- or if your mistakes are carried forever.

Small Talk: How to Talk to People, Improve Your Charisma, Social Skills, Conversation Starters & Lessen Social Anxiety


Aston Sanderson - 2016
    Never feel awkward again when you meet new people. If you've worried about social anxiety, how to listen, what to say, and how to be interesting in your communication, this quick-read small talk guide will make you someone with charisma who people love to talk to. *New 2nd Edition: Updated & Expanded! Includes new chapter: Small Talk for Dating and expanded chapter on Reading Body Language* If you’ve ever felt nervous before a work party, blind date, or friend’s dinner, worry no more after reading this book and getting awesome tips on improving your social skills, listening and charisma. If you buy Small Talk today, you will: Learn simple but effective techniques for starting and keeping conversations going Get dozens of new conversation starters you can use on anyone Master your listening ability with three simple tricks Discover why you already have great charisma, and you just need to practice Revolutionize how you think about your own communication skills Enhance the signals you are sending and receiving with body language Understand the ways people are communicating with you in a conversation Build confidence in your social skills Get ready to use questions and answers in conversation with charisma Develop new ways to understand communication See why small talk is actually very important to your success in work, social settings and your love life And much, more more! Download the ultimate small talk guide today to have better conversations Download our book to learn how to start conversations, how to improve your social skills and what kind of questions to ask people you’ve just met, when you learn how to be a better listener, how to start and end conversations, how to move on from social skill “mistakes,” and how to calm your nerves. Also learn what not to talk about and see a list of awesome questions to ask new acquaintances to get the conversation flowing and keep it interesting. The book is simple, short, has proven strategies, and you’ll be better right away at conversation and small talk. Download our Small Talk book and practice your new social skills tonight Instantly click and download to get all the strategies you need to become a better conversationalist tonight. Note: You don’t need a Kindle to read this small talk conversation book — read it in your browser with the Kindle Cloud Reader right now by clicking the buy button