It all started with one kiss. One amazing and slightly forbidden kiss. Lexie Ashworth is a beautiful fashion designer from California with her heart set on NYC.Carter Graham is a lawyer with a playboy reputation he just can't shake. No matter how hard he tries.Their friends say they aren't right for each other. He would ruin her without even meaning to do it, and she won't allow anything to stand between her and her dreams. Does it really even count if you don't label it, though? What happens when the friend lines are blurred?It must be true what they say... Opposites really do attract.
Love can make a person do crazy things . . . A city girl with a morbid fear of deep water, Torre DeRoche is not someone you would ordinarily find adrift in the middle of the stormy Pacific aboard a leaky sailboat – total crew of two – struggling to keep an old boat, a new relationship and her floundering sanity afloat. But when she meets Ivan, a handsome Argentinean man with a humble sailboat and a dream to set off exploring the world, Torre has to face a hard decision: watch the man she's in love with sail away forever, or head off on the watery journey with him. Suddenly the choice seems simple. She gives up her sophisticated city life, faces her fear of water (and tendency towards seasickness) and joins her lover on a year-long voyage across the Pacific. Set against a backdrop of the world's most beautiful and remote destinations, Love with a Chance of Drowning is a sometimes hilarious, often moving and always brave memoir that proves there are some risks worth taking. 'A gripping romantic adventure – with laughs (and whales).' Maggie Alderson 'Hilarious ... recounts the adventure of a lifetime.' Vogue Australia 'My respect for Torre as a human being increased with each chapter. Torre is the living embodiment of my mantra, fear less, love more!' Huffington Post 'By turns gripping, laugh-out-loud funny, moving and uplifting ... Almost any reader with a sense of adventure or a desire to confront their fears should love it.' Australian Bookseller+Publisher
The award-winning author of "Dream Boy" and "Winter Birds" weaves the moving tale of a woman determined to figure out if the visions that haunt her are merely dreams--or nightmares she has lived and forced herself to forget. "Each sentence bristles with equal parts rage and grace".--Kelly McQuain, "The Philadelphia Inquirer".
Drowned, set in the idyllic countryside during a short-lived Swedish summer, gets under one’s skin from the first page, creating an atmosphere of foreboding in which even the perfume of freshly picked vegetables roasting in the kitchen becomes ominous. Marina has left behind her stalled relationship and floundering career in Stockholm to visit her sister in rural Skåne, where she lives in a house full of books, gorgeous flowers and, as Marina soon learns, many secrets. Nothing is as it seems in this spellbinding novel of psychological suspense that combines hothouse sensuality with ice-cold fear on every page. More than a mere thriller, this debut novel delves deep into the feminine soul and at the same time exposes the continuing oppression of women in Sweden’s supposedly enlightened society. Mixing hothouse sensuality with ice-cold fear on every page, Drowned heralds the emergence of a major new talent on the international scene.
Profoundly moving, filled with tenderness, and brought to life by a curious, sprawling imagination, Drowning Practice is the story of a mother and daughter trying to save each other’s lives at what could be the end of the world One night, everyone on Earth has the same dream—a dream of being guided to a watery death by a loved one on November 1. When they wake up, most people agree: after Halloween, the world will end. In the wake of this haunting dream and saddled with its uncertainty, Lyd and her daughter, Mott, navigate a changed world, wrestling with how to make choices when you really don’t know what comes next. Embarking on a quixotic road trip filled with a collection of unexpected and memorable characters, Lyd and Mott are determined to live out what could be their final months as fully as possible. But how can Lyd protect Mott and help her achieve her ambitions in a world where inhibitions, desires, and motivations have become unpredictable, and where Mott’s dangerous and conniving father has his own ideas about how his estranged family should spend their last days? Formally inventive and hauntingly strange, Drowning Practice signals the arrival of a singular new voice in Mike Meginnis, who writes with generosity and precision, humor and sorrowfulness. Stirring and surprising at every turn, Drowning Practice is literary speculative fiction at its best and with a pulsing heart: a mother and daughter trying to decide how they should live out what might be the final months of their—or anyone’s—life on Earth.
In Margaret Coel's latest Wind River Reservation mystery, Arapaho attorney Vicky Holden and Father John O'Malley find themselves immersed in the dark underbelly of the illegal market for Indian relics.
From the beloved and award-winning author Junot Díaz, a spellbinding saga of a family’s journey through the New World. A coming-of-age story of unparalleled power, Drown introduced the world to Junot Díaz's exhilarating talents. It also introduced an unforgettable narrator— Yunior, the haunted, brilliant young man who tracks his family’s precarious journey from the barrios of Santo Domingo to the tenements of industrial New Jersey, and their epic passage from hope to loss to something like love. Here is the soulful, unsparing book that made Díaz a literary sensation.
A gripping suspense story about a woman who returns to Galveston, Texas after a personal tragedy and is irresistibly drawn into the insular world she’s struggled to leave. Photographer Clare Porterfield's once-happy marriage is coming apart, unraveling under the strain of a family tragedy. When she receives an invitation to direct an exhibition in her hometown of Galveston, Texas, she jumps at the chance to escape her grief and reconnect with the island she hasn't seen for ten years. There Clare will have the time and space to search for answers about her troubled past and her family's complicated relationship with the wealthy and influential Carraday family. Soon she finds herself drawn into a century-old mystery involving Stella Carraday. Local legend has it that Stella drowned in her family's house during the Great Hurricane of 1900, hanged by her long hair from the drawing room chandelier. Could Stella have been saved? What is the true nature of Clare's family's involvement? The questions grow like the wildflower vines that climb up the walls and fences of the island. And the closer Clare gets to the answers, the darker and more disturbing the truth becomes. Steeped in the rich local history of Galveston, The Drowning House portrays two families, inextricably linked by tragedy and time. "The Drowning House marks the emergence of an impressive new literary voice. Elizabeth Black's suspenseful inquiry into dark family secrets is enriched by a remarkable succession of images, often minutely observed, that bring characters, setting, and story sharply into focus." —John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Literary depictions of drowning or burial at sea provide fascinating glimpses into the often-conflicted human relationship with memory. For many cultures and religious traditions, properly remembering the dead involves burial, a funeral, and some kind of grave marker. Traditional rituals of memorialization are disturbed by the drowned body, which may remain lost at sea or be washed up unrecognized on a distant shore. The first book of its kind, Literary Drowning explores depictions of the drowned body in twentieth-century Irish and Caribbean postcolonial literature, uncovering a complex transatlantic conversation that reconsiders memory, forgetfulness, and the role that each plays in the making of the postcolonial subject and nation. Faced with fissures in cultural memory, postcolonial writers often identify their situation—and their nation’s—with that of the drowned body. Floating aimlessly without a grave, unmemorialized and perhaps unremembered, the drowned corpse embodies the troubled memory of the postcolonial nation or individual. Boeninger follows a trail of drowned bodies and literary influence from the turn-of-the-century Irish playwright J. M. Synge, through the poems and plays of St. Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, to the lesser-known work of Guyanese British novelist and poet David Dabydeen, and finally to the contemporary Irish plays of Marina Carr. Each author, while borrowing from those who came before, changes the image of the drowned body to reflect different facets of the project of remembering postcolonially.
What does it mean to devote yourself wholly to helping others? In Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar seeks out people living lives of extreme ethical commitment and tells their deeply intimate stories; their stubborn integrity and their compromises; their bravery and their recklessness; their joys and defeats and wrenching dilemmas. A couple adopts two children in distress. But then they think: If they can change two lives, why not four? Or ten? They adopt twenty. But how do they weigh the needs of unknown children in distress against the needs of the children they already have? Another couple founds a leprosy colony in the wilderness in India, living in huts with no walls, knowing that their two small children may contract leprosy or be eaten by panthers. The children survive. But what if they hadn't? How would their parents' risk have been judged? A woman believes that if she spends money on herself, rather than donate it to buy life-saving medicine, then she's responsible for the deaths that result. She lives on a fraction of her income, but wonders: when is compromise self-indulgence and when is it essential? We honor such generosity and high ideals; but when we call people do-gooders there is skepticism in it, even hostility. Why do moral people make us uneasy? Between her stories, MacFarquhar threads a lively history of the literature, philosophy, social science, and self-help that have contributed to a deep suspicion of do-gooders in Western culture. Through its sympathetic and beautifully vivid storytelling, Strangers Drowning confronts us with fundamental questions about what it means to be human. In a world of strangers drowning in need, how much should we help, and how much can we help? Is it right to care for strangers even at the expense of those we are closest to? Moving and provocative, Strangers Drowning challenges us to think about what we value most, and why.
