An inspirational tale of her journey through extreme personal crisis."You can run, but you can't hide from yourself."Abandoned by her mother as a young child and with a father constantly on the run, Shelley's life was never normal. Her family's involvement with South London's criminal underworld left her isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Falling deeper and deeper into depression and despair - she snapped.Shelley got on the first coach out of London with only the clothes she stood up in and £30 in her pocket. She didn't care where she was going, as long as she could disappear completely from her oppressive life. For years, she lived anonymously in refuges, hostels and on the streets. It would take something remarkable to bring her back to the real world.

    military brat during the early Vietnam war years in Saigon The early Vietnam war years through the eyes of a U.S. military brat: In May of 1962, Naval Chief Petty Officer Bryant Arbuckle flew to Saigon to establish a new Armed Forces radio station. Next to follow were his wife and three boys, Leslie among them. Saigon Kids is the candid, recondite slice of fourteen-year-old military brat Les Arbuckle's experience at the American Community School (ACS) during the critical months of the Vietnam War when events would, quite literally, ignite in downtown Saigon. In 1963, Saigon was beautiful, violent, and dirty - and the most exciting place a fourteen-year-old American boy could live. Saigon offered a rich array of activities, and much to the consternation of their parents and teachers, Les and his fellow military brats explored the dangers with reckless abandon running from machine gun fire, watching a Buddhist monk burn to death, visiting brothels late at night or, trading currency on the black market Coming of age in the streets of Vietnam War torn Saigon: When Les first arrives in Vietnam, he is a stranger in a strange land, expecting boredom in a country he doesn't know. But the American social scene is more vibrant than he expected. The American Community School is a blend of kids from all over the globe who arrived in Saigon as the fuse on Saigon was about to ignite. As the ACS students continue their American lifestyle behind barbed wire, Saigon unravels in chaos and destruction. In spite of this ugliness - an ever-present feature of everyday life -- Les tells his story of teenage angst with humor and precocity. Coming of age tale with a twist: The events leading up to the Vietnam War provide an unusual backdrop for this coming-of-age tale with a twist. Saigon Kids will also make a perfect companion to the documentary film (sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts) currently in production. The film chronicles the lives of -military brats- living in Saigon in the volatile years from 1958 to 1964.

    Over sixty men were murdered, including the leader of the Winter Hill Gang, James "Buddy" McLean. The leadership of one of the most influential non-Italian crime organizations in the United States was inherited by his childhood friend, Howard T. "Howie" Winter. In CITIZEN SOMERVILLE the events during his tenure offer a true picture of an era in Boston's pre-Whitey Bulger history when the streets were protected by a close-knit group of Irish-Italian "businessmen." The son of one of Winter's closest friends, BOBBY MARTINI has laid his own history bare to depict a life of survival in the rough streets of Somerville, stopping just short of entering the Mob life. The death of Martini's two brothers as well as the murders and suicides of scores of others reveal the darker personal side of a small New England town. CITIZEN SOMERVILLE slices a layer deeper than a crime memoir by allowing a usually ostracized faction to speak - the women. After decades of silence, three strong and very different females lift the Mob veil and voice their own struggle to survive in Somerville's criminal circle. Often painfully poignant and yet frequently hilarious, CITIZEN SOMERVILLE is a microscopic view of a generation struggling to walk the moral tightrope between societal decency and the loyalty of criminality.

    A young priest on the other side of the screen is shaken by what he learns. A former college athlete with an MBA from a prestigious university, Father Joe Russo is not your typical man of God. Nine years earlier, his own life took a tragic turn and he gave everything up, committing his life to the church. Now his peaceful existence is being tested, and he finds himself questioning the God he serves, the vows he made, and someone he left behind.In this gripping thriller, a priest and an FBI agent work to uncover secrets and expose hidden crimes, but when it seems they have it all figured out, everything they think they know will be questioned.

    When Elizabeth Beisel watched the Olympics on television for the first time, she was seven years old in her parents’ living room. She decided right then and there she would compete at the Olympic Games one day. Eight years later, she made her first of three Olympic Teams as a fifteen-year-old. Despite her huge success in the sport, Elizabeth struggled with doubts, failures, and injuries throughout her entire swimming career. In Silver Lining, she he gives a compelling look inside the pressures that come with being an Olympian, and how she mentally conquered the stress of competing at the highest level for over a decade. From a small-town girl with a dream, to winning Olympic medals, Elizabeth gives you a glimpse inside her life as you’ve never seen it before. She is relatable, open, and honest, and her storytelling in Silver Lining> will leave you feeling emotional and inspired to pursue your own dreams, no matter who you are.  Reviews “Silver Lining is a story of amazing perseverance of one of the greatest leaders in our sports history.” – Rowdy Gaines “You will be inspired, and also discover why Elizabeth is one of the most respected athletes to grace a pool deck for Team USA.” – Katie Ledecky “Elizabeth wonderfully captures what it means to be an elite athlete. Silver Lining shows how perseverance, dedication, and a support team can help one overcome life’s biggest obstacles.” – Caeleb Dressel About the Author Elizabeth Beisel is a three-time Olympic swimmer and two-time Olympic medalist for the United States of America. Visit her at www.elizabethbeisel.com.

     Jordan Wylie, a young man from a tough area of Blackpool where kids like him often went off the rails, chose a life in the army. He saw service in Iraq and learned to cope with the horrors he'd witnessed, then suffered an injury that blocked any chance of climbing up the military ladder. But an old army colleague suggested he join a security team on a tanker in Yemen. Ex-servicemen were offered dazzling salaries and `James Bond' lifestyles between jobs protecting the super-tankers carrying consumer goods to Europe and the US. However, for the men tempted to go, the price they paid was the claustrophobia and isolation of life on board and the ever-present possibility of death skimming towards them across the vast, lonely blue sea. Jordan was one of these men. In Citadel, he writes the first account of these dangerous years from someone 'at the front'. A young soldier from the backstreets of Blackpool, he was determined to make the most of his life, but unsure of the way forward. To his surprise, he found his answers in the perilous waters of 'Pirate Alley'.

    

    Secrets are different from privacy. They are things you are forced to keep to yourself, by family, friends, by your own shame. Secrets like these come to the surface one day and demand an airing.Emerging from an unconventional, boisterously happy childhood, Mary-Rose MacColl was a rebellious teenager. And when, at the age of fifteen, her high-school teacher and her husband started inviting Mary-Rose to spend time with them, her parents were pleased that she now had the guidance she needed to take her safely into young adulthood.It wasn't too long, though, before the teacher and her husband changed the nature of the relationship with overwhelming consequences for Mary-Rose. Consequences that kept her silent and ashamed through much of her adult life. Many years later, safe within a loving relationship, all of the long-hidden secrets and betrayals crashed down upon her and she came close to losing everything.In this poignant and brave true story, Mary-Rose brings these secrets to the surface and, in doing so, is finally able to watch them float away.

    After eighteen months of trying, my mother eventually conceived and nine months later I was born. My birth was a difficult one. It was like I was never meant to be in this world.” Boy is Nigel Cooper’s memoir from the age of five to sixteen. It tells the shocking, brutal, disturbing, emotional story of his childhood spent in and out of various care homes and institutions during the 1970s and 1980s. When Nigel was just seven years old, after the untimely death of his sister and father, his mother asked social services to take him away – and then his nightmare began. For the next nine years of his life, Nigel was repeatedly rejected by his mother and spent his childhood among bullies, abusers, psychopaths and criminals. He spent time in a children’s psychiatric hospital, where they carried out unimaginable tests, pumped him full of drugs and physically abused him; care homes, where he would come face to face with rough estate kids who would beat him up, force him to steal for them and threaten his life; and barbaric assessment centres for disturbed and delinquent children, where the staff were, at times, sicker than the children.The system tried to break Nigel and it was a miracle that he survived. The British care system robbed him of his childhood. His story is truly extraordinary and will do a lot more than shed light on what it was like growing up during the Jimmy Savile years.Boy is powerfully written, edgy, gripping and beautifully crafted.

    and trying, and trying some more? How far do you go to achieve your dream of having children?So Close is the heart wrenching, exhilarating, devastatingly funny story of Tertia Albertyn's battle with infertility. Tertia wanted a baby so badly she went through nine IVFs. Most people give up after the third.I don't think I am being brave at all. I am just too terrified NOT to try again.In her worst nightmare she could never have imagined that making a baby would take her four years, each treatment bringing her and her husband Marko closer and closer to creating their family.During Tertia's journey everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Until, finally, everything goes just right.Tertia is as hilarious as she is irrepressible, as approachable as she is knowledgeable. If you are struggling with infertility, have triumphed over infertility or have felt empathy with someone who is going through this experience, you will find a friend in Tertia.

    

    Because it is in first person, the reader directly sees the psychological impact of the abuse and comes to understand how the abuser manipulates the victim into cooperating in it. We see the psychological costs of being abused—denial, depression, mental splitting, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, alcohol abuse, hopelessness, shame, fear of harm to her family—but gradually we also experience Laila's struggle. Set in the context of Muslim society where the young female victim knows her word will not be believed in preference to that of her "good" Muslim father, the story could have happened anywhere. Yes, the details are shocking, but they are not prurient, as the negative reviews have suggested. They are sickening and saddening but they are real. The details serve to underline the horrible things that abusers do to kids. I learned much about how the relationship between abuser and victim works and why it is so hard for the victim to break away and recover. This story is all the more moving because it is true. It took great courage for Laila to expose her life in this way, even if she does use a pseudonym. Her opening explanation for why she wrote the book reveals her hope that at least one abused individual will read it and live a healthy, happy life after the horrific experiences of such a childhood.Synopsis: Not Easily Washed Away is the true story of a young girl who was born to a Muslim family in Pakistan. She suffered through sexual, mental and physical abuse for fifteen years, which was perpetrated by her father Abdulla. Laila decides to take advantage of her father’s incestuous addiction by having him acquire a visa for her to the United States, where she feels as if she can rid herself of a putrid past. The book is written from a psychological perspective in first person, as Laila shares her painful past with the reader, sparing no details of her ordeal as a child, teenager and young adult. After she realizes her father’s diabolical plan is to keep her in Pakistan for himself, Laila decides to take fate into her own hands. Her new attitude helps her to turn the tables on her father, now living in America, and manipulate him into marrying an American woman to get Laila’s visa to the United States.The United States is not the instantaneous answer to Laila's plight. She arrived in Seattle, Washington, in 2004 to start a new life away from her father, but ends up being unable to stop the incestuous relationship with him and later on, with her stepmother. Things get even worse for Laila, as she is now twenty years old, depressed, and worried that her family’s fate back in Pakistan might be jeopardized if she leaves home. In the Spring of 2007 Laila’s life changes when her younger sister arrived from Pakistan and when she meets an interesting, Christian, Jamaican man at school. The young man confronts Laila about the abuse, and when she realizes she has feelings for him, she tells him everything. The young man tries to convince Laila that she can become mentally stronger and free herself of her abusive father and stepmother by running away with him.

    This is incidental as it is about neither of those industries in particular. It is about the magic and wonderment of those days as seen through the eyes of a child – my eyes! It is about the days when imagination was the biggest plaything that we possessed. The days when a plastic football provided a whole summer's play. It is about the scrapes that I found myself in and the things that I observed around me, and how they made me feel. All the stories are true and I personally experienced every one of them. The names of the characters have been changed. The reason being that I have no idea of the whereabouts of many of the characters contained within my stories, so I have no way of asking them for their permission to include them in this book. Some have possibly passed away, and it would be unfair of me to mention them without their blessing. Anyone who knows me will know who they are though.

    Jordan details life as an Air Force Mortuary Non Commissioned Officer. In his stunning debut Jordan forces the reader to walk beside him on his journey in this gruesome world. Jordan holds nothing back, and shares in graphic detail how he honored Americas heroes, both at deployed locations and stateside. This book will pry your eyes wide open as you gasp from the sheer horror he faced daily, from dealing with the families of the fallen, to witnessing the embalming and preparations of the deceased. Jordan also shares how this job taxed his mental well being, as he suffered in silence, longing not to care. Jordan is still serving on Active Duty and suffers from the crippling effects of PTSD, his story will enlighten you, it will touch you, and yes, you will cry.

    Today, we hear stories of over-worked midwives and short-staffed hospitals, but the truth is that childbirth has never been easier. For our grandmothers, pregnancy was a journey into the unknown. Rather than ponder which pushchair to buy or fret over towelling versus disposable nappies, they worried about what lay ahead. Home births were often lonely affairs with the midwife or doctor only visiting when birth was imminent. During hospital births, medical staff rarely gave explanations and would push and prod with little offer of pain relief let alone sympathy. Standard care in labour was the O.B.E. - Oil, Bath and Enema. Nursing staff gave firm rules on how long to stay in bed, how to lie in bed and even when to go to the toilet. And life didn't get much easier after giving birth. Taking care of a home and baby was hard work when there were few washing machines, no disposable nappies and heating came from coal carried in from the back yard.