As uplifting and essential as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Gabrielle Donnelly’s novel will speak to anyone who’s ever fought with a sister, fallen in love with a fabulous pair of shoes, or wondered what on earth life had in store for her. With her older sister, Emma, planning a wedding and her younger sister, Sophie, preparing to launch a career on the London stage, Lulu can’t help but feel like the failure of the Atwater family. Lulu loves her sisters dearly and wants nothing but the best for them, but she finds herself stuck in a rut, working dead-end jobs with no romantic prospects in sight. When her mother asks her to find a cache of old family recipes in the attic of her childhood home, Lulu stumbles across a collection of letters written by her great-great-grandmother Josephine March. In her letters, Jo writes in detail about every aspect of her life: her older sister, Meg’s, new home and family; her younger sister Amy’s many admirers; Beth’s illness and the family’s shared grief over losing her too soon; and the butterflies she feels when she meets a handsome young German. As Lulu delves deeper into the lives and secrets of the March sisters, she finds solace and guidance, but can the words of her great-great-grandmother help Lulu find a place for herself in a world so different from the one Jo knew?Some things, of course, remain unchanged: the stories and jokes that form a family’s history, the laughter over tea in the afternoon, the desire to do the right thing in spite of obstacles. And above all, of course, the fierce, undying, and often infuriating bond of sisterhood that links the Atwater women every bit as firmly as it did the March sisters all those years ago. Both a loving tribute to Little Women and a wonderful contemporary family story, The Little Women Letters is a heartwarming, funny, and wise novel for today.

    . . . Ammons makes you laugh and forces you to think hard about the way humans relate to natural phenomena and to themselves. From such simple, short expression emerge complex, often confounding ideas. New readers of poetry as well as those with an active interest in lyric verse will love this volume.”—Booklist

    

    She can't seem to get it together because, honestly, she doesn't really know why she's in school. She's desperately in need of a sense of purpose to give meaning to her life. Shara Anderson has that sense of purpose through her intimate relationship with the Lord, but needs some balance in her Christian walk. Through divine orchestration, the two women meet, and their lives are forever changed.?Dance Into Destiny is a story of friendship, love, and overcoming issues from the past. It illustrates how pursuing an intimate relationship with the Lord is the key to reaching one's true potential and fulfilling one's God-ordained destiny and purpose.

    He returns home one day to find that his wife, Lexy, has died under strange circumstances. The only witness was their dog, Lorelei, whose anguished barking brought help to the scene - but too late. In the days and weeks that follow, Paul begins to notice strange "clues" in their home: books rearranged on their shelves, a mysterious phone call, and other suggestions that nothing about Lexy's last afternoon was quite what it seemed. Reeling from grief, Paul is determined to decipher this evidence and unlock the mystery of her death. But he can't do it alone; he needs Lorelei's help. A linguist by training, Paul embarks on an impossible endeavor: a series of experiments designed to teach Lorelei to communicate what she knows. Perhaps behind her wise and earnest eyes lies the key to what really happened to the woman he loved. As Paul's investigation leads him in unexpected and even perilous directions, he revisits the pivotal moments of his life with Lexy, the brilliant, enigmatic woman whose sparkling passion for life and dark, troubled past he embraced equally.

    On a balmy July night in New Hampshire a shot rings out in a garden, and a man falls to the ground, terribly wounded. The wounded man is Spencer McCullough, the shot that hit him was fired–accidentally?–by his adolescent daughter Charlotte. With this shattering moment of violence, Chris Bohjalian launches the best kind of literate page-turner: suspenseful, wryly funny, and humane.

    In love since childhood with Thomas Fraser, when she hears that he's been killed in America, she marries the Duke of Gordon with disastrous results. But Fraser, very much alive, returns to England to claim her love. In addition to telling a heart-wrenching love story, Island of the Swans also paints a fascinating portrait of a powerful and controversial woman and the tumultuous era in which she lived. Patroness of poet Robert Burns, advisor to King George, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Jane Maxwell was a towering figure in her own time and is an unforgettable heroine. (20100126)

    Get everything. When their best friend commits suicide over her divorce, Elise, Brenda and Annie decide enough is enough. Each was crucial to her husband's career. But now that the men are successful, they've traded in their wives for newer, blonder models. Over lunch one day they form the First Wives Club. But this is no support group. This is the SAS in Chanel. Painstakingly, inexorably, they plan the downfall of the men who've wrecked their lives—and know that revenge has never tasted sweeter...

    “Babel’s 1920 Diary, the source for many of his remarkable Red Cavalry stories, is itself as remarkable as the stories, particularly when one considers that the diarist was a journalist of only twenty-six. The staccato sentences in which Babel rapidly describes the horrific details of revolutionary brutality have the impact of an accomplished style, one that in its spontaneously elliptical way is strangely no less artful than the artfully nuanced directness that is the triumph of Red Cavalry.”—Philip Roth “An electrifying translation accompanied by an indispensable introduction. . . . Babel’s journey is a Jewish lamentation . . . a tragic masterwork.” —Cynthia Ozick, The New Republic “A precursor of Holocaust literature, and more powerful in its effect than any Holocaust literature that I have managed to read.”—Harold Bloom, New York Times Book Review

    Their lives are shadowed by the infamous actions of her Granddad Les in his yellow weatherboard house, just over the fence.Although Les died twelve years ago, his notoriety has grown in Cub’s lifetime and the local community have ostracised the whole family. When Cub’s estranged aunt Helena and cousin Tilly move next door into the yellow house, the secrets the family want to keep buried begin to bubble to the surface. And having been kept in the dark about her grandfather’s crimes, Cub is now forced to come to terms with her family’s murky history.The Yellow House is a powerful novel about loyalty and betrayal; about the legacies of violence and the possibilities of redemption."Such energy and precision in the writing, not to mention originality." - Tegan Bennett Daylight

    So, with great resourcefulness, she advertised for a companion and eventually staked out a corner of her own—one with a view. Mildred Walker's skill as a storyteller never falters in this portrayal of an elderly woman who won't give up.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    For quick and effective relief -- or at least some literary comfort -- from everyday and exceptional problems, try a poem. Over the ages, people have turned to poets as ambassadors of the emotions, because they give voice and definition to our troubles, and by so doing, ease them. No matter how bad things get, poets have been there, too, and they can help you get over the rough spots.This is the first poetry anthology designed expressly for the self-help generation. The poems listed include classics by Emily Dickinson, Lord Byron, Ogden Nash, and Lucretius, to name just a few, along with newer works by such current practitioners as Seamus Heaney and Wendy Cope. This book has a cure or consolation for nearly every affliction, ancient or modern. And no side effects-except pleasure.

    KEY TOPICS: Information about the genre of detective fiction. Collection of award winning stories. Information about award winning authors.MARKET: Those interested in detective fiction.

    Yet the conservative Christian author, Nathan Wilson, bravely sets forth to push it over the top. Tweaked versions of all the original characters work together in an absurd tangle of Evangelical goofiness struggling to make sense of the pathetically gnostic vision of the original story. You won't want to miss all body parts, cats, and youth pastors left behind, Buff Williamson's Ivy League deductions, Haddie the Whore of Babylon, or the climactic struggle with the Tulsa Antichrist in a Christian "book store." If you regret reading Left Behind, read Right Behind to ease that pain with laughter.