Both sought to redefine themselves beneath the stars. By the time they made it to the snowy Cascade Range of British Columbia—the trail’s end—Aspen and Justin were in love.Embarking on a new pilgrimage the next summer, they returned to those same mossy mountains where they’d met, and they married. They built a world together, three years of a happy marriage. Until a cold November morning, when, after kissing Aspen goodbye, Justin left to attend the funeral of a close friend.He never came back. As days became weeks, her husband’s inexplicable absence left Aspen unmoored. Shock, grief, fear, and anger battled for control—but nothing prepared her for the disarming truth. A revelation that would lead Aspen to reassess not only her own life but that of the disappeared as well.The result is a brave and inspiring memoir of secrets kept and unearthed, of a vanishing that became a gift: a woman’s empowering reclamation of unmitigated purpose in the surreal wake of mystifying loss.

    In order to break the dysfunctional cycle, Charisse needs to overcome the chaos caused by generations of family secrets, extreme poverty, fanatical religion and sexual abuse all of which leaves her ill equipped to make her own adult decisions. Can she overcome a legacy of lies?

    A baby boy, a few hours old, is left by his mother, wrapped in nothing but two sheets of newspaper and hidden amongst the undergrowth by a canal bank. An hour later, a late-shift postman is walking wearily home when he hears a faint cry. He finds the newspaper parcel and discovers the newborn, white-cold and whimpering, inside.After being rushed to hospital and against all odds, the baby survives. He’s baptised by the hospital chaplain as Richard.Everything feels as though it’s looking up; Richard is put into local authority care and regains his health. However, after nearly five blissful years in a rural care home filled with loving friends, it soon unfolds that his turbulent start in life is only the beginning…Based on a devastating true story, this inspirational memoir follows Richard’s traumatic birth, abusive childhood, and search for the truth.

    Beaten, humiliated and sexually abused by him from the age of six, she thought her life couldn't get worse. But one day it did."I was used to Daddy screaming 'whore's child' at me, over and over again. But I couldn't get used to what he made me do."Anya was too terrified to tell anybody about what her uncle did to her. But then he got careless and started abusing her in front of the other children. When her brothers started calling her a 'whore', Anya cracked and all her terrible secrets came pouring out.Anya had always coped because there was one woman who loved her deeply, her 'Mummy'. But this time love was not enough. One morning 'Mummy' just left.Determined to make a new life, Anya buried her feelings and tried to move on. But when she ended up homeless, living in her car, she knew she had to face her past if she was ever going to find happiness and security again.Top 10 Sunday Times Bestseller, Abandoned is Anya's inspirational story of her fight to find love, acceptance and a place to belong.

     Barbara Robinette Moss grew up in the red clay hills of Alabama, the fourth of eight children, in a childhood defined by close sibling alliances, staggering poverty, and uncommon abuse at the hands of her wild-eyed, charismatic, alcoholic father. In Fierce, Moss looks at what happens when a child of such a family grows up. At once poetic and plainspoken, Moss, a "powerful writer" (Chicago Tribune), paints a vivid, moving portrait of her persistent quest to reinvent her life and rebel against the rural indigence, addiction, and broken dreams she inherited from her parents. With warmth, insight, and candor, Moss tells the poignant story of finally leaving everything she knew in Alabama to fulfill her ambition to become an artist. It is an odyssey filled with gritty improvisation (bringing her son, Jason, to her night job to sleep on the floor), bittersweet pragmatism (filling her purse on a dinner date with shrimp, rolls, and even a doily, to bring home to a waiting eight-year-old), and staunch conviction and pride (chasing a mail carrier down the street to defend her use of food stamps). As with many other children of alcoholics, the legacy of her father's alcoholism catches up with Moss, and an abusive relationship -- an inheritance and addiction of its own sort -- threatens to destroy all that she has accomplished. But as Moss learns to cope with her anger and pain, parenthood helps her discover true strength. Ultimately, Fierce is a warm, honest, and triumphant story, from a writer celebrated for her Southern lyricism, about a woman determined to make it on her own -- to shrug off the handicaps of her childhood and raise her son responsibly and well.

    He was a seemingly respectable businessman from Canada, so attentive and caring it was easy to ignore the warning signs - until he started, step by step, to take over her life. Six months after they first met Al Amin's web of lies started to unravel and Alison became aware that he had a sinister dark side. When she tried to end the relationship, the unthinkable happened and she found herself the victim of an escalating campaign of terror. Even when Al Amin was found with knives and guns, the police had no powers to detain him. Nobody could have imagined the events that were to follow, as Alison was left fearing for her life. It would take all her strength to survive. Brave and gripping, Stalked tells of one young woman's fight against the man who terrorized her, and her determination to defeat the fear and live a normal life.

    We meet in cities where we've never been before. We meet where no one will recognize us. A "man of God" is how someone described my father to me. I don 't remember who. Not my mother. I'm young enough that I take the words to mean he has magical properties and that he is good, better than other people. With his hand under my chin, my father draws my face toward his own. He touches his lips to mine. I stiffen. I am frightened by the kiss. I know it wrong, and its wrongness is what lets me know, too, that it is a secret.

    A baby boy, a few hours old, is left by his mother, wrapped in nothing but two sheets of newspaper and hidden amongst the undergrowth by a canal bank. An hour later, a late-shift postman is walking wearily home when he hears a faint cry. He finds the newspaper parcel and discovers the newborn, white-cold and whimpering, inside.After being rushed to hospital and against all odds, the baby survives. He’s baptised by the hospital chaplain as Richard.Everything feels as though it’s looking up; Richard is put into local authority care and regains his health. However, after nearly five blissful years in a rural care home filled with loving friends, it soon unfolds that his turbulent start in life is only the beginning…Based on a devastating true story, this inspirational memoir follows Richard’s traumatic birth, abusive childhood, and search for the truth.

    Margaret Forster's father was not a man to answer questions - least of all questions about life and death, so she attempts to answer them for herself. As Forster looks back at Arthur's life and indomitable character, she evokes incidents from her childhood, his working life and stubborn old age, trying to make sense of their largely unspoken relationship, and of his tenacious hold on life, and on his family. Arthur and Marion's lives were ordinary, and apparently unremarkable, but, when faced with death, lives like these become strangely precious.

    Ever since she can remember, she wanted to be a dancer. Throughout Rockettes, Rockstars and Rockbottom, we watch Keltie move to New York City and follow her dreams. She struggles and overcomes incredible odds to be invited into the world’s premier dance company, The Radio City Rockettes. All of her dreams come true just as she falls madly in love for the first time with her complete opposite: a long-haired, whisky-drinking, rockstar. Keltie takes us on an adventure complete with painful missteps on her path to finding love, dealing with loss and working as a performer in the entertainment industry. When rockstar number one breaks her heart, Keltie replaces him with a long-haired, skinny jean wearing clone. And when that relationship ends, she finds herself dancing on the MTV Video Music Award stage making love eyes at her next skinny jean wearing future boyfriend, whose face in the coming months would taunt her from the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Keltie hits rockbottom after finding out that rockstar number three had not only been touring all over the world, but touring the beds of various women. Left in a state of disbelief, she vows to break her addiction to emotionally unavailable men in skinny jeans. She does what any women does when her heart is broken: she cries, stops eating and is sure her life is over. Keltie walks us through the steps of healing heartbreak and finding yourself after your identity is stolen by someone else’s heart. Her ability to be honest to herself and then share that with the world is not only incredibly brave, but inspiring. Charminglyawkward, her resiliency, determination and love of life are truly something to aspire to.It’s the one story we want to hear again and again, a love story with a happy ending.

    That simple act became a national news story because Abby was the director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas who, after participating in her first actual abortion procedure, walked across the road to join the Coalition for Life. "Unplanned" is a heartstopping personal drama of life-and-death encounters, a courtroom battle, and spiritual transformation that speaks hope and compassion into the political controversy that surrounds this issue. Telling Abby’s story from both sides of the abortion clinic property line, this book is a must-read for anyone who cares about the life versus rights debate and helping women who face crisis pregnancies.

    With Howard in prison, the only father he knew as a child was Bobby, his mother's pimp, drug dealer, and lover. In 1980, he was placed in his first foster home. While foster care was often horrifying, nothing compared to the daily near-death experiences he survived living in Father Panik Village with Bobby and Debbie. On May 23, 1980 his coerced testimony sent Debbie to prison. Now a grown man, Mr. Love uses his childhood traumas to change lives. Working as a teacher allows him to use the experiences of his life to help children who live in a similar world. His experiences give him a perspective most people do not have and knowledge that cannot be obtained from any textbook. There Is An Urgency explores these experiences in an effort to make others aware that people like him walk among us every day. There Is An Urgency is inimitable in that it juxtaposes Mr. Love's experiences as an adult, working with children in school and juvenile detention settings, with personal accounts of physical and sexual abuse from his childhood. There Is An Urgency to share this story of hard won hope and resilience after years of terrifying abuse by a real life monster.

    An undersized daredevil, prone to jumping off roofs into trees and off bridges into lakes, Adam was a kid who broke his own bones but would never break apromise to his parents. But after high school, Adam fell in with the wrong crowd, and his family watched as his appetite for risk dragged him into a downward spiral that eventually landed him in jail. Battling his inner demons on a last-chance road to redemption, Adam had one goal: to become the best of the best—a U.S. Navy SEAL. An absorbing chronicle of heroism and humanity, Fearless presents an indelible portrait of a highly trained warrior who would enter a village with weapons in hand to hunt terrorists, only to come back the next day with an armload of shoes and meals for local children. It is a deeply personal, revealing glimpse inside the SEAL Team SIX brotherhood that also shows how these elite operators live out the rest of their lives, away from danger, as husbands, fathers, and friends. Fearless is the story of a man of extremes, whose courage and determination was fueled by faith, family, and the love of a woman. It’s about a man who waged a war against his own worst impulses and persevered to reach the top tier of the U.S. military. Always the first to volunteer for the most dangerous assignments, Adam’s final act of bravery led to the ultimate sacrifice. Adam Brown was a devoted man who was an unlikely hero but a true warrior, described by all who knew him as fearless.

    In the early summer of 2014, Farida Khalaf was a typical Yazidi teenager living with her parents and three brothers in her village in the mountains of Northern Iraq. In one horrific day, she lost everything: ISIS invaded her village, destroyed her family, and sold her into sexual slavery. The Girl Who Escaped ISIS is her incredible account of captivity and describes how she defied the odds and escaped a life of torture, in order to share her story with the world. Devastating and inspiring, this is an astonishing, intimate account of courage and hope in the face of appalling violence"--

    She describes her fear when her family questioned Gloriavale's beliefs and practices. When her parents fled with their children, Lilia was forced to make a desperate choice: to stay or to leave. No matter what she chose, she would lose people she loved. In the outside world, Lilia struggled. Would she be damned to hell for leaving? How would she learn to navigate this strange place called 'the world'? And would she ever find out the truth about the criminal convictions against her grandfather?