At the age of five, she stopped talking, and no one seems to know why. Refusing to communicate beyond a few physical actions, Oakley remains in her own little world. Bullied at school, she has just one friend, Cole Benson. Cole stands by her, refusing to believe that she is not perfect the way she is. Over the years, they have developed their own version of a normal friendship. However, will it still work as they start to grow even closer? When Oakley is forced to face someone from her past, can she hold her secret in any longer?

    When Greg moves into town and finds out what she's doing, he thinks it's a great idea...so he starts doing it too! It's just one of the things that reserved, young David must tolerate as their friendship grows throughout the years. As they near adulthood, they grow not only closer to each other, but closer to God as well. David finds himself content in every way, but when tragedy occurs David must struggle to find his way back to God. Contemporary Christian Fiction: Top Rated... Best Selling... Award Winning! Don't let the fact that it's the first in a series scare you off - Chop, Chop is a complete, stand-alone novel that will NOT leave you hanging. Sequels are available, however, for those who wish to follow the characters further. Often pegged as a "Young Adult" novel, demographics show that most readers of the Chop, Chop series are actually between the ages of 25 and 55 (and the sequels are definitely geared toward that age group). Whether you're young or old, Chop, Chop is a true coming-of-age story about friendship, loss and forgiveness that is sure to touch your heart.

    . . Eve, with passion that overruled her total innocence, ran away from home to live in unrepentant sin; won stardom singing on the stage of the Parisian music halls before Worlds War I; married into the world of international diplomacy; and become the greatest lady Champagne. Eve's younger daughter, Freddy, inherited all of her mother's recklessness. Growing up in California, she became a pilot by sixteen; throughout World War II she ferried war planes in Britain--a glorious redhead who captured men with one humorous, challenging glance. Eve's elder daughter, Delphine, exquisite, gifted, and wild, romped through the nightlife of Hollywood of the thirties. On a whim, she made a screen test in Paris and soon found herself a great star of French films. She chose to risk her life in occupied France because of a love that transformed her frivolity into courage.

    Romance for him is art and beauty. But sex is sex. And he needs lots of it. He doesn’t connect the two. He’s never witnessed love in its finer form, for his youth was crippled by a difficult upbringing. But no one knows that. When he encounters Penelope Green at an art exhibition selling her work, he’s not only spellbound by her beauty, but by her art which speaks to his soul. It’s not just smoldering attraction that they share, but also difficult pasts. While her upbringing took place in a rundown estate caring for her troubled mother, Blake’s, although brought up in a picturesque village, was just as dark. He grew up around the windswept moors in a gothic castle with walls stained in secrets, and where his mother worked as a maid. Leading her into a world of opulence, taste, and raw lust, Blake Sinclair with eyes that flit from moody to stormy blue, manages to seduce Penelope. Her entry into his bedroom, other than eliciting steamy passion, opens up a part of him hidden even from himself. He soon finds himself swimming in uncharted waters. Although he’s not new to addiction, this time it’s not just sex that’s got Sinclair in its tantalizing grip, but something deeper and more powerful. Penelope’s not only a hot temptress, but a kindred spirit, and even more profoundly, she knows what “dark” feels like. When he learns that she too has secrets, Penelope becomes his obsession. Even if his need for control is constantly challenged by her feisty independence: a quality that not only feeds his sudden unhealthy need to possess her but also places a wedge between them. Dylan Fox is a nefarious character that shadows this story. As the son of Lord William Fox, Blake’s late mother’s employer, Fox grew up terrorizing the young Blake. Believing that Blake stole from him, Dylan Fox, who runs a criminal empire, drags Blake into the center of a scandal involving the rich and powerful, a private island, and teenage girls. Blake Sinclair has one powerful weapon: a clear conscience. But he has to convince Penelope and the world around him first. Faced with criminal gangs, while working behind the scenes on a dangerous exposé involving big names, Blake flexes his considerable muscles to save Penelope and his reputation.

    Lovers and Liars is Sally Beauman's sensuous, very contemporary story of public masks and secret lives, of a "perfect" marriage that is not what it seems, and of lovers long separated yet destined to meet, tumultuously, again. On a frosty January morning soon after the New Year's revels, an exquisitely dressed, beautiful blonde woman sends four identical parcels to four different destinations: Paris, New York, Venice and London. But the lovely messenger is not who she claims to be.Photographer Pascal Lamartine receives his package in Paris: it is a woman's black glove, silky, scented, and disturbing. In London, reporter Gini Hunter, daughter of a famous Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, opens her parcel to find even more threatening contents. And within hours, Gini's enterprising editor assigns both her and Pascal to expose the story of a lifetime; a story so rich, so ripe with potential scandal, that it could make headlines--and ruin lives. For Gini and Pascal must penetrate the perfect facade of John Hawthorne, the charming, charismatic U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, to sift through the layers of ever-shifting truth about his life.The wealthy scion of a famous American family--in short, perfect presidential material--John Hawthorne appears to have thrown away a promising political career to take a diplomatic post. Why? His wife, Lise, a legendary beauty, is a master at seducing the media; her delicate features are a constant presence on the society pages for her charity work, her skills as a hostess, and her unrelenting chic. Yet the exhaustive, adoring coverage has left the real woman mysteriously opaque. And now, unbelievably, she seems to be the source of certain whisperings about her husband.But beyond the sensational story they are about to unmask--a black-widow web of deceit, betrayal, and dark desires more complex and perilous than they could have imagined--Gini and Pascal must confront themselves, their past, and their brief, passionate love affair twelve years before, when the fascination between them reached a fever pitch only to end explosively. Even as their investigation plunges them dangerously into the hypocrisies of the privileged and powerful, where each surprising revelation is replaced by a new, even more shocking contradiction, past merges with present, taking the two lovers back to the hot, bare room at the edge of danger where, for one burning moment, the world made perfect sense, took perfect shape.Deftly woven of erotic secrets and unfolding deceptions that stretch across more than two decades, Lovers and Liars is a romantic and spellbindingly suspenseful journey into the mysteries of the heart, where love can sustain the soul--or twist it cruelly."First-rate suspense." --Cosmopolitan

    At this point, what Stella needs to control most is keeping herself away from anyone or anything that might pass along an infection and jeopardize the possibility of a lung transplant. Six feet apart. No exceptions.The only thing Will Newman wants to be in control of is getting out of this hospital. He couldn’t care less about his treatments, or a fancy new clinical drug trial. Soon, he’ll turn eighteen and then he’ll be able to unplug all these machines and actually go see the world, not just its hospitals.Will’s exactly what Stella needs to stay away from. If he so much as breathes on Stella she could lose her spot on the transplant list. Either one of them could die. The only way to stay alive is to stay apart. But suddenly six feet doesn’t feel like safety. It feels like punishment.What if they could steal back just a little bit of the space their broken lungs have stolen from them? Would five feet apart really be so dangerous if it stops their hearts from breaking too?

    . .A Killer Who Gets Away With Murder Once. . .It's been twenty years since the night Jake Marcott was brutally murdered at St. Elizabeth High School. It's a night that shattered the lives of Lindsay Farrell, Kirsten Daniels, and Rachel Alsace. It's a night they'll never forget. A killer will make sure of that. . . Finds It Easier To Kill Again. . . A 20-year reunion has been scheduled for St. Elizabeth's. For some alumni, very special invitations have been sent: their smiling senior pictures slashed by an angry red line. . . And Again. . .And Again. . .

    It might be part of the city's history, but it's also a place of brand new beginnings.Georgie has followed her childhood sweetheart to Brighton but is determined to carve out a career for herself in journalism. Throwing herself into the city's delights is fun and exciting, but before she knows it, she's sliding into all kinds of trouble . . . Charlotte's in the city for a new start, hoping to keep her head down and somehow get over the heartbreaking loss she's suffered in the past. But Margot, the stylish old lady on the top floor, has other ideas. Like it or not, Charlotte must confront the outside world, and the possibilities it still holds.A terrible revelation sent Rosa running from London to start again as a sous chef. The work is gruelling and thankless but it's a distraction at least . . . until she comes up against the stroppy teenager next door who challenges her on her lifestyle choices. What if Rosa's passion for food could lead her to more interesting places?As the three tenants find each other, it's as if a whole new chapter of their lives has begun. The House of New Beginnings is a moving and uplifting novel from bestselling author Lucy Diamond.

    Emily Aulenbach is thirty-two, a lawyer married to a lawyer, working in Manhattan. An idealist, she had once dreamed of representing victims of corporate abuse, but she spends her days in a cubicle talking on the phone with vic­tims of tainted bottled water—and she is on the bottler’s side. And it isn’t only work. It’s her sister, her friends, even her husband, James, with whom she doesn’t connect the way she used to. She doesn’t connect to much in her life, period, with the exception of three things—her computer, her BlackBerry, and her watch. Acting on impulse, Emily leaves work early one day, goes home, packs her bag, and takes off. Groping toward the future, uncharacteristically following her gut rather than her mind, she heads north toward a New Hampshire town tucked between mountains. She knows this town. During her college years, she spent a watershed summer here. Painful as it is to return, she knows that if she is to right her life, she has to start here.

    If they weren't failing outright, causing countless Americans to lose their jobs and homes, they were being propped up with emergency bailouts. Trapped in a cycle of panics, depressions and soaring unemployment, Sutton saw only one way out, only one way to win the girl of his dreams.So began the career of America's most successful bank robber. Over three decades Sutton became so good at breaking into banks, and such a master at breaking out of prisons, police called him one of the most dangerous men in New York, and the FBI put him on its first-ever Most Wanted List.But the public rooted for Sutton. He never fired a shot, after all, and his victims were merely those bloodsucking banks. When he was finally caught for good in 1952, crowds surrounded the jail and chanted his name.Blending vast research with vivid imagination, Pulitzer Prize winner J.R. Moehringer brings Willie Sutton blazing back to life. In Moehringer's retelling, it was more than poverty or rage at society that drove Sutton. It was one unforgettable woman. In all Sutton's crimes and confinements, his first love (and first accomplice) was never far from his thoughts. And when Sutton finally walked free - a surprise pardon on Christmas Eve, 1969 - he immediately set out to find her.Poignant, comic, fast-paced and fact-studded, Sutton tells a story of economic pain that feels eerily modern, while unfolding a story of doomed love that is forever timeless.(overview via Barnes and Noble)

    I’m needy. I’m broken. Cutting breaks through my numbness, but only opens more wounds. Depression, self-harm, bullying....that's my reality. Sex and guys....that's my escape. The space between the truth and lies is blurred leaving me torn, lost and confused. And while the monsters that live in my head try to beat me-- the two men that I love try to save me. This is my story of friendship, heartache, and the grueling journey that is mental-illness.Warning: Due to possible triggering subject matter and some sexual situations this book is not recommended for anyone under the age of 17 years old.

     Behind the shiny facade of her seemingly idyllic life in Chicago, Mattie Hart feels as if she is falling apart. After sixteen years of marriage, and one beautiful teenage daughter, Mattie has discovered that her husband, Jake, a high-profile defense attorney, is ensconced in yet another love affair. It is only after Jake finally confesses his infidelity and leaves to live with his girlfriend that a far greater crisis descends upon the embattled Hart family -- Mattie receives some devastating news that will alter all their lives. Wracked by guilt at these unforeseen developments, Jake returns home to be with Mattie. Here, in this most daunting and unexpected of circumstances, Joy Fielding deftly ushers her characters through a poignant and heartbreaking drama about love's astonishing power to defy the greatest odds and to heal the deepest wounds. Bearing all the distinctive qualities of a contemporary classic, "The First Time" is a dazzling illumination of a marriage at the crossroads, where the ties that bind become frayed but refuse to sever, and where a long estranged husband and wife discover, for the first time, exactly what love really means. At once profoundly cathartic and inspiring, "The First Time" finds Joy Fielding at the height of her powers as she explores the amazing resilience of the human spirit.

    She loves illuminating history, filling the spaces in people's hearts with stories of their family legacies. But Tess's own history is filled with gaps: a father she never met, and a mother who spent more time traveling than with her daughter. Then Dominic Rossi arrives on the doorstep of the San Francisco shop Tess hopes to buy, and he tells her that the grandfather she never knew is in a coma. Tess has been named in his will to inherit half of Bella Vista, a hundred-acre apple orchard in the magical Sonoma town called Archangel. The rest is willed to Isabel Johansen. A half sister she hadn't heard of. Isabel is everything Tess isn't: all softness to Tess's hard angles, warm and nurturing where Tess is tightly wound. But against the rich landscape of Bella Vista, with Isabel and Dominic by her side, Tess begins to discover a world filled with the simple pleasures of food and family, of the warm earth beneath her bare feet. A world where family comes first and the roots of history run deep.

    In the patrician circles of Boston's Beacon Hill, she acquires grace, culture - and a passionate lover in Owen's nephew, Paul. But Owen's death shatters her dreams. Favored in his will, she now faces the wrath of his family, who close ranks against her. Disinherited, Laura vows to recapture all that has been ruthlessly taken away.With brilliance and flair she builds a hotel empire. Yet beneath her successful facade lives the outcast girl, longing for the home and family she has lost. as long-buried secrets rise like threatening clouds, Laura has to fight to regain her love, her family, and to claim her true inheritance!

    Married to Tanner, a top cosmetic dentist, she has a wonderful daughter finishing high school and twin stepsons from Tanner's first marriage. No one in her exclusive neighborhood in Goldenhills, Massachusetts, knows what living with the demanding Tanner is really like. They know even less about the life she left behind in Florida almost two decades ago. Back then, Molly was Maddy Carmichael, living with her twin brother and neglectful mother in a run-down trailer park amid the orange groves of Florida. After the terrible events of her high school prom night—and the act of vengeance that followed—she fled north and reinvented herself. But the veneer of Molly's polished existence is finally cracking. As secrets old and new are revealed, Molly must face painful truths and the choices she made in their wake—and find the strength to become the woman she once hoped to be.