There, sparks fly when she tangles with Adam Fielding, a visionary businessman-farmer determined to make his own way and answer to no one. Neither is looking for marriage, but they give in to their undeniable chemistry.Annie and Adam's marriage brims with early promise and unanticipated passion, but their dream of having a child eludes them as a mysterious illness of mind and body plagues Annie's pregnancies. Amidst deepening economic adversity, natural disaster, and the onset of world war, their personal struggles collide with the societal mores of the day. Annie's shattering periods of black depression and violent outbursts exact a terrible price. The life the Fieldings have forged begins to unravel, and the only path ahead leads to unthinkable loss. Gold medal - Independent Publisher Book Awards, Best Regional FictionSarton Women's Book Award for Historical FictionWestern Writers of American Spur Award, Best First NovelGrand Prize Short List, Eric Hoffer Book AwardsFirst Runner-up for Historical Fiction, Eric Hoffer Book AwardsFirst place, Goethe Award for Historical Fiction, Chanticleer InternationalFinalist, National Indie Excellence AwardsFinalist, High Plains Book AwardsFinalist, Nancy Pearl Book AwardsFinalist, Chatelaine Awards, Chanticleer InternationalFinalist, Spur Awards, Best Traditional NovelFinalist, Next Generation Indie Book Awards,Finalist, Da Vinci Eye Award, Eric Hoffer Book AwardsSemifinalist, Somerset Awards, Chanticleer InternationalPowell's City of Books Staff Pick

    Inspired by a hunger to know the story behind every good read and governed by the vision that what has transpired has a story to tell, we’ve brought Behind the Story™ for every book fan to enjoy.Our mission is to enable novel lovers all around the world to heighten and enrich their reading experience like they’ve never thought possible before… Begun “For the Fans, By the Fans“, we take our readers on a tour by the hand to show what is behind the curtains – what is “Behind the Story”That’s what makes us smile. Now, let us share it with you.Praises from: The "Behind the Story Effect"After reading a BTS... You feel inspired to follow your hearts and dreams... — ArshiI felt like the Behind the Story offered a new look into the book, and appreciated that, as most of the time, that angle is unexplored.— Aspiring AuthorEver been backstage at a concert? Here you go -- in written form.— Author, EditorI felt enriched with knowledge about the book, and I felt like I knew more about the book. — Aspiring AuthorIt makes me discover new things, and when I re-read the book, my emotions are different, deeper now that I understand what's behind the book.— KarlenI felt closer to the writer knowing more about them as a person and why they wrote what they wrote. — The Beta Reading ClubGet ready for one of the most unique experiences you will ever have...this is definitely CliffNotes and SparkNotes on Steroids. — Author, EditorSAMPLE EXCERPT:Inspiration is a hackneyed word in the creative writing world. All writers are inspired by something. Perhaps a better word to help phrase the question of ‘what inspired Jamie Ford to write his historical-fiction novel’ might be enthused, spurred, stimulated, or impassioned.The answer was a small red button pinned to Jamie’s father’s shirt that read: “I am Chinese.” A simple statement that became the title of the short story that grew into Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet—the same short story that his workshop editor urged him to turn into something bigger. The button distinguished Chinese residents from the Japanese community, the perceived enemy, whom the American government persecuted after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. It was the paranoia epidemic and the destruction of Japan towns across the United States that forms the historical backdrop of Ford’s novel.When Jamie’s father, an only child, passed away thus severing the links with his Asian heritage, he begin to explore his legacy and unearthed the histories that became the seeds of his novel. It was during his research about the Wah Mee club massacre in Seattle, that Ford encountered other people from his father’s generation who had had to wear the little red badge...

    A sassy young girl. Their audacious summer stunt could change their southern town forever.Charleston, 1964. Ida Trueluck is still adjusting to life on her own. Moving into her son's house creates a few family conflicts, but the widow's saving grace is her whip-smart granddaughter Trudy. Ida makes it her top priority to give the girl a summer she'll never forget.When a runaway truck nearly takes her life, Trudy makes fast friends with the boy who saves her. But since Paris is black, the racism they encounter inspires Trudy's surprising summer mission: to take down the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse. And she knows she can't do it without the help of her beloved grandmother.With all of Southern society conspiring against them, can Trudy, Ida, and their friends pull off the impossible?Trueluck Summer is a Southern historical women's fiction novel set in a time of great cultural change. If you like courageous characters, heartwarming humor, and inspirational acts, then you'll love Susan Gabriel's captivating tale.

    

    In the barn loft on their prairie farm, Lily Piper listens to sermons about the Second Coming, bracing herself for the moment when they'll be snatched away to another reality. But Lily's new reality turns out to be England, where she's sent just before the war to look after her grandmother. There she discovers a whole different way of being in the world.

    Robert Raymond Cook, Ray Cook's son from his first marriage, was convicted of the crime, and had the infamy of becoming the last man hanged in Alberta. Forty-six years later, a troublesome character named Louise in a story that Betty Jane Hegerat finds herself inexplicably reluctant to write, becomes entangled in the childhood memory of hearing about that gruesome mass murder. Through four years of obsessively tracking the demise of the Cook family, and dancing around the fate of the fictional family, the problem that will not go away is how to bring the story to the page. A work of non-fiction about the Cooks and their infamous son, or a novel about Louise and her problem stepson? Both stories keep coming back to the boy. Part memoir, part investigation, part novella, part writer's journal, The Boy, is the author's final capitulation to telling the story with all of the troublesome questions unanswered.

    It is 1945, and London is still reeling from the Blitz and years of war. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, are apparently abandoned by their parents, left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women with a shared history, all of whom seem determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all he didn’t know or understand in that time, and it is this journey – through reality, recollection, and imagination – that is told in this magnificent novel.

    When his father dies, Anil becomes the de facto head of the Patel household and inherits the mantle of arbiter for all of the village’s disputes. But he is uneasy with the custom, uncertain that he has the wisdom and courage demonstrated by his father and grandfather. His doubts are compounded by the difficulties he discovers in adjusting to a new culture and a new job, challenges that will shake his confidence in himself and his abilities.Back home in India, Anil’s closest childhood friend, Leena, struggles to adapt to her demanding new husband and relatives. Arranged by her parents, the marriage shatters Leena’s romantic hopes and eventually forces her to make a desperate choice that will hold drastic repercussions for herself and her family. Though Anil and Leena struggle to come to terms with their identities thousands of miles apart, their lives eventually intersect once more—changing them both and the people they love forever.

    Three decades later, Janie has relocated to Montreal, although the scars of her past remain visible. After abandoning her husband and son and taking refuge in the home of her friend, the scientist Hiroji Matsui, Janie and Hiroji find solace in their shared grief and pain—until Hiroji’s disappearance opens old wounds and Janie finds that she must struggle to find grace in a world overshadowed by the sorrows of her past.Beautifully realized, deeply affecting, Dogs at the Perimeter evokes the injustice of tyranny through the eyes of a young girl and draws a remarkable map of the mind’s battle with memory, loss, and the horrors of war. It confirms Madeleine Thien as one of the most gifted and powerful novelists writing today.

    Unable to commit suicide, she hires a professional killer and contracts him to kill her, by her choice and on her terms. In an effort to dissuade her from death, her killer elicits from her stories about her travels. In this reversal of Sheherazade, who saves her life through a continuous story, Restlessness becomes a story about how to avoid story, a travel book about how to evade travel, a manual for how to stay put.

    For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm.While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women—all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in—have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they’ve ever known or should they dare to escape?Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women’s all-female symposium, Toews’s masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.

    He was listed in the Blue Book but joined no clubs. His magnificent dining room at Kragsyde, his house at Lobster Cove, rarely entertained visitors. If George Nixon Black was mentioned at all, it was almost as rumor. His greenhouses boasted rare plants, his collection of antiques and paintings were extraordinary and his patronage of the arts favored unknown female artists. Each winter he quietly boarded a luxury European-bound steamship with a man eighteen years his junior. Despite a privileged youth marred by violence and uncertainty, contrasted with the danger his lifestyle and secrets placed him in, his ability to obtain happiness and be himself was remarkable. While Black was probably content to slip away unnoticed, Kragsyde was to have no such fate. Garnering much attention when it was first built, and adored by architects and scholars ever since, the famous shingle-style house has made it impossible for Black to fully disappear. In The House at Lobster Cove, you will see behind the doors of Kragsyde, the house that sheltered and shaped him, and continued to tell his story long after both were gone. Using characters, letters and events from history, Jane Goodrich's first novel is part family saga and part love story, as well as an engaging personal journey for the author. Although Kragsyde was demolished in 1929, it was later rebuilt, in every detail, by Goodrich and her husband, doing all the work themselves on an island in Maine. A special feature of this edition is the letterpress printed cover and title page, hand printed on 100% cotton paper at the author's studios at Saturn Press in Maine.

    A wave of fear sweeps across the barren prairies of central North Dakota in April of 1920 with the tragic news that seven members of a farm family and their hired boy have been brutally murdered at their home just north of Turtle Lake in McLean County. A massive search for the killers begins immediately in the midst of an intense statewide election campaign. Three weeks later, eager investigators encouraged by nervous politicians get a signed confession from one of the prime suspects in the case. He is sentenced that same day to life in the state penitentiary in what the New York Times referred to then as ''the most rapid administration of justice in the country.'' From the beginning, the man denies his guilt and says his confession was obtained under duress, intimidation and fear. In November, his lawyers file a motion in district court asking that his plea of guilty be withdrawn and for a trial upon the merits. Their motion is strengthened when some new evidence is discovered on the Wolf family farm only days before the motion is filed. Some ninety years later, people in the area still recall the words the convicted man was supposed to have said: ''My eyes have seen but my hands are clean!''

    For readers of Lori Lansens, Joseph Boyden, and John Bemrose's The Island Walkers.     After a proposed subdivision becomes the site of a Mohawk protest -- the land, which has long formed a kind of neutral border between a reserve and the neighbouring town, is contested -- tensions escalate through three sweltering summer months, exposing old wounds, as well as forging new and sometimes surprising connections.This compelling contemporary story is told in the voices of several vivid, unforgettable characters, from the restless young Mohawk woman dreaming of adventure and fame in the wider world; to the successful businessman who has made good use of his position between two communities, and who harbours a surprisingly tender secret; to the high school hero whose inner life would shock his admirers, especially his ambitious mother; and to the unexpected lovers, who must weigh happiness against history and fierce pride.Smoke River is wise and tender, fearless and often very funny. It heralds the arrival of a vibrant, original, and intrepid new voice in Canadian literature.

    There were Canes in Canada before the United States erupted into civil war. Their roots are deep, their legacy is rich, but Langston Cane V knows little of his heritage. He is thirty-eight, divorced, and childless and has just been fired for sabotaging a government official's speech. The eldest son of a white mother and prominent black father, Langston feels more acutely than ever the burden of his illustrious family name and his racially mixed heritage. To be black in a white society is hard enough; to be half-black, half-white is to have no identity at all. Or so Langston believes. After a run-in with his father, Langston takes off for his feisty aunt's house in Baltimore, where he embarks on a remarkable quest for his family's past.It's said that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, but to Langston, history offers not condemnation but reprieve. For when he stumbles across a treasure trove of family documents, he sets off on a journey through time that will lead him back to the famous antislavery raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and the great-great-grandfather who fought beside John Brown. He rediscovers the long line of relatives who have battled for racial justice, decade after decade. He finds passion, dignity, and courage--and, at last, by unearthing and giving voice to those who came before him, he finds himself.Rich in historical detail and gracefully flowing from the slave trade of nineteenth-century Virginia to the present, Any Known Blood gives life to a story never before told, a story of five generations of a black Canadian family whose tragedies and victories merge with the American experience.