That euphoria is challenged when her "friendship" with R&B singer, Darian Russell, exposes the cracks in their foundation. Darian Russell is known for his baby-making music and loyalty to remaining a bachelor. After suffering heartbreak early in his career, he vowed never to let another woman get that close to his heart again. Avoiding love had been easy until Chanel Henderson made it impossible. ***This story includes explicit language, strong sexual content, and violence. Please don't read this story if you feel that you will be triggered.***

    and Mrs. Fang called it art.Their children called it mischief.Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. But when an artist’s work lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise well-adjusted children. Just ask Buster and Annie Fang. For as long as they can remember, they starred (unwillingly) in their parents’ madcap pieces. But now that they are grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it difficult to cope with life outside the fishbowl of their parents’ strange world.When the lives they’ve built come crashing down, brother and sister have nowhere to go but home, where they discover that Caleb and Camille are planning one last performance -– their magnum opus -– whether the kids agree to participate or not. Soon, ambition breeds conflict, bringing the Fangs to face the difficult decision about what’s ultimately more important: their family or their art.

    A guitar. Punk rock. The chords of a rock 'n' roll road trip in a coming-of-age novel that is a must-read story about finding your place in the world...even if you carry scars inside and out. In attempting to describe himself in his college application essay--help us to become acquainted with you beyond your courses, grades, and test scores--Harbinger (Harry) Jones goes way beyond the 250-word limit and gives a full account of his life. The first defining moment: the day the neighborhood goons tied him to a tree during a lightning storm when he was 8 years old, and the tree was struck and caught fire. Harry was badly burned and has had to live with the physical and emotional scars, reactions from strangers, bullying, and loneliness that instantly became his everyday reality. The second defining moment: the day in 8th grade when the handsome, charismatic Johnny rescued him from the bullies and then made the startling suggestion that they start a band together. Harry discovered that playing music transported him out of his nightmare of a world, and he finally had something that compelled people to look beyond his physical appearance. Harry's description of his life in his essay is both humorous and heart-wrenching. He had a steeper road to climb than the average kid, but he ends up learning something about personal power, friendship, first love, and how to fit in the world. While he's looking back at the moments that have shaped his life, most of this story takes place while Harry is in high school and the summer after he graduates.

    A masterful debut, Coldwater Revival will forever be etched in your memories and upon your heart.Download the Readers' Guide.

    And he’s just been run over by a milk float. It was tough enough to fill the hours of the day when he was active. But now he’s broken his arm and fractured his foot, it looks set to be a very long few weeks ahead. Frank lives with his cat Bill (which made more sense before Ben died) in the typically British town of Fullwind-on-Sea. The Villages in Bloom competition is the topic of conversation amongst his neighbours but Frank has no interest in that. He watches DVDs, spends his money frivolously at the local charity shop and desperately tries to avoid the cold callers continuously knocking on his door. Emailing his daughter in America on the library computer and visiting his friend Smelly John used to be the highlights of his week. Now he can’t even do that. Then a breath of fresh air comes into his life in the form of Kelly Christmas, home help. With her little blue car and appalling parking, her cheerful resilience and ability to laugh at his jokes, Kelly changes Frank’s life. She reminds him that there is a big wide-world beyond the four walls of his flat and that adventures, however small, come to people of all ages. Frank and Kelly’s story is sad and funny, moving, familiar, uplifting. It is a small and perfect look at a life neither remarkable nor disastrous, but completely extraordinary nonetheless. For fans of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry this is a quirky, life affirming story that has enormous appeal. And it’s guaranteed to make you laugh.

    Fortunately, poison is the very superfood of the satirist. Patty Friedmann, the reigning queen of black comedy, hits one out of the park with her family straight out of Tolstoy--unhappy in its own way, a uniquely twisted Southern way. Meet the Baileys. Born and bred in a working class New Orleans neighborhood, Zib and Wilson think the thick cloud of cigarette smoke enveloping their mother is what probably killed their father. Certainly the toxicity of Jerusha’s dark, cynical attitudes has driven her children far from the nest. Wilson has escaped to Chicago, married a woman who hates him, converted to Judaism, and become a decorated professor of Organic Evolution. Zib, almost forty, has made it only as far as the Florida Panhandle, where she's an assistant manager at the local Winn-Dixie, doomed to fending off a sleazy boss given to late night phone calls. Only one person, as isolated as she is, shows Jerusha any affection: Dustin Puglia, chubby, wise, and fearless, a ten-year-old living next door with a poisonous mother of his own. Although Wilson and Zib have forged independent lives away from their mother—as well as each other—their father's death brings them back together for a darkly droll, yet heart-wrenching round of domestic insanity. Does it remind you of AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY? Or THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS? Patty Friedmann got there first! And she’s just as funny and observant as the authors of those splendid screenplays. Who Will Like It: Fans of off-beat dark comedies like AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS, family dramas with a lot more humor than THE CORRECTIONS, the incomparable CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, and another mistress of the twisted, Flannery O’Connor. Not to mention Patty Friedmann's other books: TOO JEWISH #1 TOO JEWISH: THE NEXT GENERATION (formerly The Exact Image of Mother) PICK-UP LINE (formerly Side Effects) ELEANOR RUSHING A LITTLE BIT RUINED ODDS “Secondhand Smoke does not seek life in fancy words and clever euphemisms. It tingles because it’s raw and true … The way [Friedmann] carves a sentence gives you the sense that she’s always known how to do it.” –Critique Magazine

    He was tall, red-headed, and at our first meeting at least, a virgin. He was, in fact, the perfect man.     That he was fictional hardly entered into it...   On the cusp of thirty, Emma Sheridan is desperately in need of a change. After a string of failed relationships, she can admit that no man has ever lived up to her idea of perfection: the Scottish fictional star of romantic fantasies the world over—James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser.   Her ideal man might be ripped from the pages of a book, but Emma hopes that by making one life-altering decision she might be able to turn fiction into fact. After selling all her worldly possessions, Emma takes off for Scotland with nothing but her burgeoning travel blog to confide in.   But as she scours the country’s rolling green hills and crumbling castles, Emma discovers that in searching for her own Jamie Fraser, she just might find herself.

    The aircraft is reported to have crashed into the English Channel. There are no survivors and no bodies are recovered. Records of the incident mysteriously go missing. The Susan Rae and its crew vanish, committed to the dustbin of history.On the day the Susan Rae disappears, the English village of Lower Friththingden is the scene of several remarkable events. Two Rolls-Royces are seen parked near the village church. The entourage has paused to listen to the sound of the village children’s choir. Overhead a German parachute mine floats down, heading directly toward the church. Inside are most of the village inhabitants, including a young girl rumored to be the illegitimate child of Winston Churchill.More than a half-century later two men, an embittered American and a reclusive Englishman, have their lives altered as a consequence of the disappearance of the Susan Rae. Vince Collesano, ill, depressed, and alone, travels to England to satisfy his wife’s final request. Seconds before her death she had pointed to a painting of an English churchyard and asked to have her ashes buried there – in the country where she had been born and raised.Unfortunately, Vince has no idea as to just where in England that particular churchyard is located. The promise cannot be kept without the help of his late wife’s cousin, Albert “Bertie” Ambrose, a sad little man who hasn’t ventured outside of London for more than thirty years.Despite Vince’s intense dislike of Bertie, and all things English, the pair team up for what Vince believes to be a search for his wife’s final resting place. Given an ample supply of Marmite, they just may succeed.

    Frances Calhoun wrote in the conversational southern language of the early 20th century. Episodes include: "The Rabbit's Left Hind Foot", "A Green Eyed Billy" and, "Education and Its Perils." After the author's death, later books in this series were written by Emma Sampson.

    Made in America.   An ordinary boy with extraordinary dreams. A man whose legend spreads across the frontier. Ride the epic saga of an American hero and the battles that forged his soul in these classic tales in the legendary Preacher series.   In 1812, a boy filled with wanderlust and courage runs away from home, westward, into a vast, dangerous land. Along the way he learns the rule of the frontier: do whatever it takes to survive. By the time the boy—now a young man—is hired to lead a wagon train through the last leg of the Oregon Trail, he has acquired a nickname known throughout the West: Preacher. Armed with a long gun, he is as fierce as the land itself.   For the brave pioneers who are counting on this mountain man to lead them to a Northwest paradise, the Preacher’s cunning and fighting skills will mean the difference between life and death. But even Preacher can’t see all the dangers ahead, or how his legend as a frontiersman will lead him into the most violent fight of all . . .

    We Follow The Ups And Downs Of Mr Starlight's Career As He Heads To The Bright Lights Of America, As Seen Through The Eyes Of Cled, His Brother.

    It is a saga, as well. A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle. The bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. If the liquid in the bottle is actually is the secret essence of the universe, as some folks seem to think, it had better be discovered soon because it is leaking and there is only a drop or two left.

    Tom Swan is not a professional soldier. He's really a merchant and a scholar looking for remnants of Ancient Greece and Rome - temples, graves, pottery, fabulous animals, unicorn horns. But he also has a real talent for ending up in the midst of violence when he didn't mean to. Having used his wits to escape execution, he begins a series of adventures that take him to street duels in Italy, meetings with remarkable men - from Leonardo Da Vinci to Vlad Dracula - and from the intrigues of the War of the Roses to the fall of Constantinople.

    It is purely for their own amusement that they create a fictional mutual friend: an elderly lady, Miss Hargreaves... The sexton does not doubt her existence. For him, Miss Hargreaves is as real as you or I. And she gradually assumes a fully-rounded character in the imaginings of the two young men as they while away their holiday in expanding the details of her life: her book of poetry, her parrot Dr Pepusch, her harp, and her hip-bath. It is merely a continuation of their little joke when they write to invite her to visit them back in their cathedral home-town of Cornford. It is something of a surprise when Miss Hargreaves accepts their invitation. And their disbelief turns to confusion and horror as, one evening soon afterwards, her train pulls into Cornford Station . . . As Dr Glen Cavaliero stresses in his introduction, Miss Hargreaves is a brilliantly funny and moving fantasy with an admirable lightness of touch and wonderful characterisation, but for all that it has a dark and frightening undercurrent. A burlesque parable of 'the ways of God with man', the book explores how the creator must live with the consequences of their creation, no matter how uncomfortable. And if they renounce their responsibilities, then there is always the possibility that their power may be turned against them. Miss Hargreaves, first published in 1940 to great acclaim, is a classic novel of the supernatural. Glen Cavaliero is a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and author of The Supernatural and English Fiction (O.U.P., 1995).

     And yes, I do realize that I can’t seem to stop these irrational (and slightly impure!) thoughts about Max—Max, my best friend. And I know it’s a risk. You’re right! And I’ll probably never make a move but I so wish that I could get just one kiss from those lips…maybe that would stop the madness once and for all. Anyway, that’s not likely so… Regardless, I’m gonna meet THE one. If Blue never shows up, I’m on a mission to find my Mr. Right and this time I won’t stop until I do. Cross your fingers and say a prayer for me, okay?