Honoring the tradition of noted historical fiction writers such as Ken Follett, Philippa Gregory, and James Clavell, The Opium Lord's Daughter artfully weaves true events and characters into the narrative, offering the reader a selective glimpse into a world populated with rogue drug traders, imperialist government officials, religious zealots, scrappy survivors. Su-Mei, the eponymous protagonist, is a young woman unbounded by convention. From the moment we meet little Su-Mei, she valiantly resists her wealthy and powerful father—one of the largest opium traders in mid-19th century China—who attempts to force her into the barbaric practice of foot binding. Through her, readers look with fresh eyes upon antiquated and harmful traditions, and understand how time and experiences truly shape a person during their life's journey.  Her defiance sets in motion a series of events, forever altering her fate, as well as the fates of those she holds dear. Su-Mei is forced to rapidly come-of-age and muster her heroic spirit to survive her crumbling world. Taboo romances, tumultuous adventures, and heart-wrenching tragedies befall Su-Mei and her loved ones throughout the course of the story. The Opium Lord's Daughter is an expedition through the destruction of a culture, underscoring the hold and havoc drug empires continue to exert in society, even to this day. A must read for fans of Shogun, Downtown Abbey, Outlander and other sweeping tales rooted in history!

    Its only contents- an old newspaper clipping about a drowning twenty years earlier. Leaving career and friends behind, Kiran returns to the place of his youth to find the conjurer of his past.Kiran is a quiet and shy teenager with a taste for alternative music growing up in a suburban northern town during the mid-80's. The arrival of two students, the confident and rebellious Marius and the naive, cloak-wearing Moony, awaken Kiran. On the eve of graduation, fate turns the volume off in Kiran’s world and his memory fades to black.Returning to his hometown, Kiran is forced to confront the demons that haunt him. His future depends on whatever hope he has left and the life or death decision he must ultimately make. Will he hear the music again?The Boys Who Danced with the Moon is a coming of age tale of friendship, youth, and love.

    The unlikely thief, former child prodigy Benjamin Ziskind, is convinced that the painting once hung in his parents' living room. This work of art opens a door through which we discover his family's startling history--from an orphanage in Soviet Russia where Chagall taught to suburban New Jersey and the jungles of Vietnam.

    From his earliest memories, he has loved food's colors, textures and tastes. The way flavors go off in his mouth. How food keeps his mind still and his bad feelings quiet. Food has always made everything better, until the day Billy's beloved son Michael takes his own life.Billy determines to make a difference in Michael's memory and undertakes a public weight-loss campaign, to raise money for suicide prevention--his first step in an ambitious plan to save himself, and to save others. However, Billy's dramatic crusade appalls his family, who want to simply try to go on, quietly, privately.Despite his crushing detractors, Billy gains welcome allies: his community-at-large; a co-worker who lost his father to suicide; a filmmaker with his own dubious agenda; and a secret, miniature kingdom that Billy populates with the sub-quality dolls and soldiers he saves from disposal at the toy factory where he works. But it is only if Billy can confront the truth of the suffering and brokenness within and around him that he and others will be able to realize the recovery they need.Told against the picturesque yet haunting backdrop of rural, contemporary Ireland, The Weight of Him is a big-hearted novel about loss and reliance that moves from tragedy to recrimination to what can be achieved when we take the stand of our lives.

    Till the summer we turned seventeen, the summer the dolphin came to Carrig Cove . . .Donegal, 1976When a dolphin takes up residence in Carrig Cove, Emer and her best friend, Fee, feel like they have an instant connection with it. Then Dog Cullen and his sidekick, Kit, turn up, and the four friends begin to sneak out at midnight to go down to the beach, daring each other to swim closer and closer to the creature . . .But the fame and fortune the dolphin brings to their small village builds resentment amongst their neighbours across the bay, and the summer days get longer and hotter . . . There is something wild and intense in the air. Love feels fierce, old hatreds fester, and suddenly everything feels worth fighting for.

    Before she enlisted, Lauren, a classically trained singer, and her brother Danny, a bright young boy obsessed with Arctic exploration, made the most of their modest circumstances, escaping into their imaginations and forming an indestructible bond. Joining the army allowed Lauren to continue to provide for her family, but it came at a great cost.When she arrives home unexpectedly, it's clear to everyone in their rural New York town that something is wrong. But her father is so happy to have her home that he ignores her odd behavior and the repeated phone calls from an army psychologist. He wants to give Lauren time and space to acclimate to civilian life.Things seem better when Lauren offers to take Danny on a trip to visit their mother upstate. Instead, she guides them into the glacial woods of Canada on a quest to visit the Jeanne d'Arc basin, the site of an oil field that has become her strange obsession. As they set up camp in an abandoned hunting lodge, Lauren believes she's teaching Danny survival skills for the day when she's no longer able to take care of him.But where does she think she's going, and what happened to her in Iraq that set her on this path? From a writer whom The New York Times Book Review says, writes with a restraint that makes poetry of pain, Be Safe I Love You is a novel about war and homecoming, love and duty, and an impassioned look at the effects of war on women as soldiers and caregivers, both at home and on the front lines.

    A Greek journalist is tried and convicted for the murder . . . but when he’s released twelve years later, he claims his confession was the result of torture.Flash forward to modern day Greece, where a young, disaffected high school student is given an assignment for a school project: find the truth.Based on the real story of famed CBS reporter George Polk—journalism’s prestigious Polk Awards were named after him—who was investigating embezzlement of U.S. aid by the right-wing Greek government, Nikolaidou’s novel is a sweeping saga that brings together the Greece of the post-war period with the current era, where the country finds itself facing turbulent political times once again.Told by key players in the story—the dashing journalist’s Greek widow; the mother and sisters of the convicted man; the brutal Thessaloniki Chief of Police; a U.S. Foreign Office investigator—it is the modern-day student who is most affecting of them all, as he questions truth, justice and sacrifice . . . and how the past is always with us.

    But the bustle at the iconic property reaches new heights one weekend in mid-June when someone falls tragically to her death, the event rippling through the lives of four very different people. Bride-to-be Riley is at the hotel to plan her wedding. She would have preferred a smaller, more intimate celebration, but her bossy mother-in-law has taken charge and her fiancé hasn’t seemed to notice. Jean-Paul, the hotel’s manager, is struggling to keep his marriage and new family afloat, but now he must devote all his energy to this latest scandal at work. Claire, recently widowed, comes to town to connect with a long-lost love, but has too much changed in the last thirty years?  And then there’s Jason, whose romantic getaway with his girlfriend has not exactly gone the way he'd hoped and instead has him facing questions he can't bring himself to answer.Over three sun-drenched days, as the truth about the woman who died—and the secret she was hiding—is uncovered, these four strangers become linked in the most unexpected of ways. Together, they just might find the strength they need to turn their own lives around."Compelling, surprising, and a wonderful summertime read."--Nancy Thayer, New York Times bestselling author of Family Reunion"Riveting...A smart read with plenty of meat for book clubs."--Barbara O'Neal, Washington Post bestselling author of When We Believed in Mermaids“In prose as glittering as the hotel in which the novel is set, Francis shines as a master storyteller.  A must-read for anyone who could use an escape.”—Kristy Woodson Harvey, USA TODAY bestselling author of Feels Like Falling“The best kind of page-turner… This seductive novel will draw you into the fascinating backstories of characters sipping cocktails poolside, and you won't stop reading until you know what really happened."—Brooke Lea Foster, author of Summer Darlings"At a glamorous hotel by the ocean, four people face up to truths that can no longer be hidden. Summertime Guests is compelling, surprising, and a wonderful summertime read."—Nancy Thayer, New York Times bestselling author of Family Reunion"Wendy Francis delivers a smart, probing drama that skillfully unravels the complex emotional lives of an ensemble cast in Summertime Guests...a reflective, deeply engaging and suspenseful story with many threads sure to ensnare the attention of rapt readers." —Shelf Awareness "Idyllic coastal settings, drama, dynamic characters...this story has it all!" —Woman's World

    When Eliza arrives in Skagway, Alaska, she has less than fifty dollars to her name and not a friend in the world―but with some savvy, and with the help of some unsavory characters, Eliza opens a successful bakery on Skagway’s main street and befriends a madam at a neighboring bordello. Occupying this space―a place somewhere between traditional and nontraditional feminine roles―Eliza awakens emotionally and sexually. But when an unprincipled man from her past turns up in Skagway, Eliza is fearful that she will be unable to conceal her identity and move forward with her new life. Part diary, part recipe file, and part Gold Rush history, Eliza Waite transports readers to the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of a raucous and fleeting era of American history.

    Life in a Liverpool tenement block during the Great Depression is a grim struggle for Martha Connelly and her poverty-stricken family, as every day renews the threat of homelessness, hunger and disease.Family warmth remains constant however, despite the misery and disquiet of the slum surroundings, and the indomitible neighbourhood puts up a relentless fight for survival.Helen Forrester’s poignant novel relays bleakness and hardships, but celebrates also the spirit of unified hope and the restorative values of the close-knit community.

    The adults immediately set about gathering food and provisions, bracing for the deprivation they know all too well. But the children—Maral, her brother Missak, and their close friend Zaven—are spurred to action of another sort, finding secret and not-so-secret ways to resist their oppressors. Only when Zaven flees with his brother Barkev to avoid conscription does Maral realize that the Occupation is not simply a temporary outrage to be endured. After many fraught months, just one brother returns, changing the contours of Maral’s world completely. Like Tatiana de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key and Jenna Blum’s Those Who Save Us, All the Light There Was is an unforgettable portrait of lives caught in the crosswinds of history.

    Her violent father is home from prison, and the social worker is suspicious of her new bruises. An aunt she’s never met keeps calling. And if she can’t get a good grade on her science project, she’ll fail her favorite class.But Mary doesn’t want to be a victim anymore. She has a plan: build a real submarine, like the model she’s been making with Kip Dwyer, the secretly sweet class clown. Gaining courage from her heroine, Joan of Arc, Mary vows to pilot a sub across the Chesapeake Bay, risking her life in a modern crusade to save herself.Mary Underwater is an empowering tale of persistence, heroism, and hope from a luminous new voice in middle-grade fiction.

    Having lost her mother in childbirth and her father right before her marriage, she has no choice but to seek a position as a governess. She reaches out to her husband’s family solicitor, Quinn Westbourne, hoping that he may be able to help her. Quinn takes one look at the young and beautiful Emily and decides that a job as a governess will not do. He writes instead to the father-in-law she's never met, and when Leopold Clairmont offers her a place in his home, Quinn agrees to escort Emily to his isolated refuge in St. Kilda. But he did not anticipate how challenging it would be to keep his distance from the grieving widow when all he wants to do is take her in his arms and console her. The two forge a friendship on their journey, and Emily begins to wonder if she could find solace and a live a comfortable life as a widow in her new home. The tiny island of Hirta in the remote cluster of islands known as St. Kilda off the Scottish coast is wild and beautiful, her father-in-law is warm and welcoming, and her sister-in-law offers her much-needed female companionship, but the island is also full of secrets. When Emily learns things about her husband that he never revealed, she wonders if she ever really knew him at all. Torn between her devotion to her departed husband and her growing feelings for Quinn, Emily must decide whether her heart belongs to the living or the dead and find the courage to act before it's too late.

    Now he’s dead and his brother Eric and his friends Ryder and Caden, the Kings of Leighton High, are determined to make my life a living hell. They torment me in the halls, treat me like dirt. They turn the whole school against me, forcing me to be an outcast. I won’t let them break me. I’ll fight back with every ounce I’ve got. But then the truth comes out. Suddenly, the Kings are on my side, protecting me from the other students. I soon learn they’re not the jerks I thought they were. They’re actually…kind, and they want me in their crew. But can I trust them?

    When Babu, their ruthless gang master, murders his best friend Ramesh, Kalu - fearing for his own life - runs away to Kolkata. While still being pursued by Babu he meets and falls in love with with Tanya, an educated girl from an upper middle-class family.This powerful novel presents life in contemporary India with vivid realism. Evocative and beautifully written, it embraces a wide range of human emotions and has many intensely dramatic scenes.