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After the premature death of her husband of thirty years, Anna Simon learns the comfortable life they shared in Seattle had been built on lies. The discovery of her husband's betrayal challenges everything she had previously believed. Grief and shock combine with menopause to topple her formerly secure identities as wife, mother, and educator. In an effort to build a new life, Anna pursues an interest in documentary film where she is surprised to find herself attracted to a talented and engaging woman. Will she have the courage to claim a new path, to trust her own feelings? Or will she scuttle back into her shell? A funny and touching story of personal discovery, Turtle Season follows the deep inner journey of a woman at midlife as she chooses hope over despair and seeks a future that is true to her authentic self.
Escaping religious persecution after a pogrom against Jews in Ukraine in 1919, Shayna, a seventeen-year-old, along with her orphaned four-year-old nephew, her fiancé and his mother begin a treacherous journey to reach safety in America.The novel portrays the Yiddish culture of the shtetl and New York's Lower East side as the reader comes to know little Dovid, who lives with the trauma of losing his family; Yussi, who believes God has forsaken him in this new country; and his mother, Manya, who struggles to find a way to fit in America.Shayna's courage and determination hold them together and weaves a rich fabric from their separate threads to make a loving family, a safe place from which to build a new life in a new country.
Miram Toews's All My Puny Sorrows - Sunday Times Top Choice Summer Read Elf and Yoli are two smart, loving sisters. Elf is a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die. Yoli is divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive. When Elf's latest suicide attempt leaves her hospitalised weeks before her highly anticipated world tour, Yoli is forced to confront the impossible question of whether it is better to let a loved one go. Miriam Toews's All My Puny Sorrows, at once tender and unquiet, offers a profound reflection on the limits of love, and the sometimes unimaginable challenges we experience when childho...
Emma has everything Rose lacks: a faithful husband, beauty, and a healthy baby boy. Rose meets her in the hospital after her own baby dies from premature birth, and when Emma’s child dies in a suspicious house fire shortly after, the obsessive and unstable Rose is the primary suspect. Now, after almost five years in prison, Rose is up for parole, but probation officer Cate Austin must first decide whether this accused murderer can be released or if she really is a threat to society. The answer seems obvious at first, but as Cate delves deeper into Rose’s disturbing past—a suicidal mother, a distant father, on her own at a young age—the probation officer becomes entangled in the inmate’s dark world. Winner of CWA Debut Dagger Award and the Luke Bitmead Bursary, The Woman Before Me is a poignant psychological thriller that explores relationships, dysfunctional families, and the penal system with depth and sensitivity that culminates in a shocking conclusion. Did she really do it? Where does the line between love and obsession lie? Can justice be served?
This flash fiction novella, The Grief Manuscript, illustrates the dream-like, annihilating, and repetitive gestures of a dying marriage. The story recasts the emotional range of grief using metaphorical images and remarkable characters in brief, poetic scenes. The recently separated narrator inhabits a series of temporary houses as she faces the devastating and radical identity changes that come with divorce. Grief activates the narrator's demon, who appears in the form of a small monster, the Burden Animal, who torments her with her previous humiliations and belief that she is a burden to those who love her. Magical realism offers images of personal torment, where the narrator's head falls off, spiders crawl up her throat, her tongue escapes, and the fields of her psyche burn. It isn't until the narrator accepts the full expanse of her grief that she can see a way to move forward to what is "next."
Imagine an alternate reality—where Jane Austen, Henry David Thoreau, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Emily Dickinson, Emma Lazarus, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Colette, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka—all lived longer lives—wrote the poems, stories, and books we read in school—one of which changed history—and lived happily ever after with someone of the same gender. Get a cup of tea, turn off your phone, and let’s travel to this other world!
In the sixth and final thriller of the “wildly entertaining” (Kirkus Reviews) Miriam Black series, Miriam tries to break the curse of her powers, but first she must face The Trespasser a final time. Still reeling from the events of The Raptor and the Wren, Miriam must confront two terrifying discoveries: the Trespasser now has the power to inhabit the living as well as the dead, and Miriam is pregnant. Miriam knows her baby is fated to die, but Miriam is the Fatebreaker. And if the rules have changed for her nemesis, her own powers are changing as well. Miriam will do whatever it takes to break her curse and save her child. But as Miriam once again finds herself on the hunt for a serial killer and in need of an elusive physic, she can feel the threads of her past coming together—and the pattern they’re forming is deadly. To end the Trespasser’s influence in her world, Miriam must face her demon a final time. And, this time, one of them must die. Vultures is a heart-pounding conclusion to the series: “Think Six Feet Under cowritten by Stephen King and Chuck Palahniuk” (SFX).
A terrifying 1930s ghost story set in the haunting wilderness of the far north. January 1937. Clouds of war are gathering over a fogbound London. Twenty-eight year old Jack is poor, lonely and desperate to change his life. So when he's offered the chance to join an Arctic expedition, he jumps at it. Spirits are high as the ship leaves Norway: five men and eight huskies, crossing the Barents Sea by the light of the midnight sun. At last they reach the remote, uninhabited bay where they will camp for the next year. Gruhuken. But the Arctic summer is brief. As night returns to claim the land, Jack feels a creeping unease. One by one, his companions are forced to leave. He faces a stark choice. Stay or go. Soon he will see the last of the sun, as the polar night engulfs the camp in months of darkness. Soon he will reach the point of no return - when the sea will freeze, making escape impossible. And Gruhuken is not uninhabited. Jack is not alone. Something walks there in the dark...
Winner of the Benjamin L. Hooks National Book Award Winnter of the Michael Nelson Prize of the International Association for Media and History In 1964, Nina Simone sat at a piano in New York's Carnegie Hall to play what she called a "show tune." Then she began to sing: "Alabama's got me so upset/Tennessee made me lose my rest/And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam!" Simone, and her song, became icons of the civil rights movement. But her confrontational style was not the only path taken by black women entertainers. In How It Feels to Be Free, Ruth Feldstein examines celebrated black women performers, illuminating the risks they took, their roles at home and abroad, and the ways that th...
Everyone wants to belong. Shelly Christensen, an international leader in faith community disability inclusion, gives step-by-step guidance to any faith-based organization committed to welcoming and including people with disabilities and mental health conditions. An essential and practical tool for your journey of inclusion.