Moving between the speech and silence of a woman struggling to speak freely, Ruth Behar embarks on a poetic voyage into her own vulnerability and the sacrifices of her exiled ancestors as she tries to understand love, loss, regret, and the things we keep and carry with us. Behar's vivid renderings of wilted gardens, crashing waves, and firefly-lit nights recall the imagery of her inspiration, Dulce María Loynaz, who is often known as the Cuban Emily Dickinson. Presented in a beautiful bilingual English-Spanish edition--Behar serves as her own translator--Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guardé will haunt readers with the cries and whispers which illuminate the human spirit and the spectrum of emotions that make for a life and lives well-remembered.
A warm, heartfelt memoir of family, loss, and a house jam-packed with decades of goods and memories. After almost twenty years of caring for elderly parents—first for their senile father, and then for their cantankerous ninety-three-year old mother—author Plum Johnson and her three younger brothers have finally fallen to their middle-aged knees with conflicted feelings of grief and relief. Now they must empty and sell the beloved family home, twenty-three rooms bulging with history, antiques, and oxygen tanks. Plum thought: How tough will that be? I know how to buy garbage bags. But the task turns out to be much harder and more rewarding than she ever imagined. Items from childhood trigger difficult memories of her eccentric family growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, but unearthing new facts about her parents helps her reconcile those relationships, with a more accepting perspective about who they were and what they valued. They Left Us Everything is a funny, touching memoir about the importance of preserving family history to make sense of the past, and nurturing family bonds to safeguard the future.
Fans of Jodi Ellen Malpas, K. Bromberg, and Joanna Wylde will be unable to resist this sexy, deeply intimate tale of a woman running from her past, and the darkly mysterious man who sets her free. I didn’t think answering someone else’s cellphone would change my life. But the stranger with the low, deep voice on the other end of the line tempted me, awakened my body, set me on fire. He was looking for someone else. Instead he found me. And I found a hot, secret world where I felt alive for the first time. His name was Dylan, and, strangely, he made me feel safe. Desired. Compelled. Every dark thing he asked me to do, I did. Without question. I longed to meet him, but we were both keeping secrets. And mine were dangerous. If I took the first step, if I got closer to Dylan—emotionally, physically—then I wouldn’t be hiding anymore. I would be exposed, with nothing left to surrender but the truth. And my truth could hurt us both. Praise for Everything I Left Unsaid “Exquisite, thrilling, and toe-curlingly sensual . . . a delicious guilty pleasure I never wanted to end!”—New York Times bestselling author Katy Evans “I am head over heels in love with Everything I Left Unsaid by M. O’Keefe. Everything about this book hits the mark—the exceptional prose, the brilliantly defined characters, the delicious plot, and all the wonderful, dangerous secrets. It’s an absolute must-read keeper-shelf book!”—New York Times bestselling author J. Kenner “I couldn’t put this book down. Annie’s story is heartbreaking, liberating, sweet, and sexy—I want more!”—New York Times bestselling author Monica Murphy “Sweet, sizzling, sexy, and heart-wrenching, Everything I Left Unsaid broke my heart and left me yearning for more.”—New York Times bestselling author Megan Hart “The mystery, the excitement, and not to mention the elusive and very demanding Dylan Daniels will leave you breathless!”—New York Times bestselling author Lisa Renee Jones “O’Keefe is one of the best contemporary romance authors writing today. . . . Elegantly sensual and blisteringly sexual, the story immediately hooks readers and keeps them captivated with help from beautiful writing, complex characters, and a healthy dose of secrets, while a cliffhanger ending will have them eagerly awaiting Book 2. Breathtaking and passionately intense—a must-read.”—Kirkus Reviews “[O’Keefe] moves skillfully into . . . romantic suspense with this excellent series launch. . . . [She] infuses the situation with distinctive life and absorbing detail. Captivating characters and a cliffhanger ending will keep readers coming back for more.”—Publishers Weekly Everything I Left Unsaid is intended for mature audiences.
Poetry. Jewish Studies. What good luck to finally have in English the writings of the brilliant Jerzy Ficowski, the poet who lived at least seventeen lives, fighting in the Warsaw Uprising, and later traveling for years with the Roma people through the roads of Poland, opposing his government, and watching the authorities ban his poems, a poet who translated from Spanish and Romanian and Yiddish and Roma, but most of all from the tongue of silence...Beautifully translated by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer, these poems also document the tragedy of the Holocaust, with the direct and uncompromising voice with which he reminds us of the great poets such as Różewicz and Świrszczyńska, while remaining, all the while, himself. Read a piece such as 'I was unable to save / a single life' in a bookstore, and I guarantee you will want to take this book with you, to keep it for the rest of your life.--Ilya Kaminsky Thanks to these brilliant, careful, inspired translations, we can now read Jerzy Ficowski, one of Poland's best kept secrets. This book is a marvel in its weird clarity and extraordinary range of styles and subjects, from the perfectly unassuming paradox of the title, all the way through to its final poems about bumblebees and Satie and mother nature, who scratches herself and 'shudders / with a tsunami.' How fortunate we are to have the unassailable evidence that all along, there was yet another genius of 20th century Polish poetry.--Matthew Zapruder
Trailing her orange suitcase and a heart full of worry, thirteen-year-old Agatha is about to go home. She has been in and out of foster care for years now, but her latest new life – lived with naval precision with Katherine, Lawson and their dog, Chief – has proved to be the salvation that Agatha needed. She has new friends, a sense of place and space to breathe. But when the social worker says it’s time to return to her parents, Agatha’s world comes crashing down. ‘Home’ has always made her anxious and ashamed . . . and she can’t understand why she is being forced to go back. Is it possible to find a way to love her parents without having to live with them?
"I wait for him, the cold seeping through my clothes, until it finally dawns on me that he's not coming back. And I wonder why he chose her instead of me? Why he went looking for her when I was right there." Tai and Juliet have been best friends forever - since they met at kindy and decided to get married in first grade. They understand each other in the way that only best friends can. They love music, beach walks, energy drinks and, they are slowly discovering, each other. As they begin to dream of adventures beyond the HSC - a future free of homework, curfews and parents, a life together - their plans are suddenly and dramatically derailed. For Tai is sick. And not everything you wish for can come true. A poignant story of first love, hope, grief, family, and the twistedness of life. Shortlisted for Prime Minster's Literary Award Young Adult Fiction 2013
The Lady in the Van meets The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry in this uplifting, funny and moving debut novel about a 79-year-old hoarder who is convinced the world is against her.
"This will cast a spell on fans of Cheryl Strayed and Glennon Doyle." - Publishers Weekly Between Two Kingdoms meets Wild. In this heart wrenching and inspirational memoir a woman and her mother, who is suffering from dementia, embark on a road trip through national parks, revisiting the memories, and the mountains, that made them who they are. Steph Jagger lost her mother before she lost her. Her mother, stricken with an incurable disease that slowly erases all sense of self, struggles to remember her favorite drink, her favorite song, and—perhaps most heartbreaking of all—Steph herself. Steph watches as the woman who loved and raised her slips away before getting the chance to tell her story, and so Steph makes a promise: her mother will walk it and she will write it. Too aware of her mother’s waning memory, Steph proposes that the two take a camping trip out to Montana—which her mother, on the urging of Steph’s father, agrees to embark upon. An adventure full of horseback riding, hiking, and “tenting” out West quickly turns into one woman’s reflection on childhood, motherhood, personhood—and what it means to love someone who doesn’t quite remember the person she spent her lifetime becoming. A staggeringly beautiful examination of how stories are passed down through generations and from Mother Nature, Everything Left to Remember brings us the wisdom of who our memories make us under the constellations of the vast Montana sky.
What if everything you ever wanted isn’t what you actually want? Twenty-something, suit-clad, and upwardly mobile, Joshua Fields Millburn thought he had everything anyone could ever want. Until he didn’t anymore. Blindsided by the loss of his mother and his marriage in the same month, Millburn started questioning every aspect of the life he had built for himself. Then, he accidentally discovered a lifestyle known as minimalism…and everything started to change. That was four years ago. Since, Millburn, now 32, has embraced simplicity. In the pursuit of looking for something more substantial than compulsory consumption and the broken American Dream, he jettisoned most of his material possessions, paid off loads of crippling debt, and walked away from his six-figure career. So, when everything was gone, what was left? Not a how-to book but a why-to book, Everything That Remains is the touching, surprising story of what happened when one young man decided to let go of everything and begin living more deliberately. Heartrending, uplifting, and deeply personal, this engrossing memoir is peppered with insightful (and often hilarious) interruptions by Ryan Nicodemus, Millburn’s best friend of twenty years.
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of This Is Where It Ends comes another heartbreaking, emotional and timely page-turner that will keep you on the edge of your seat. The Hope Juvenile Treatment Center is ironically named. No one has hope for the delinquent teenagers who have been exiled there; the world barely acknowledges that they exist. Then the guards at Hope start acting strange. And one day...they don't show up. But when the teens band together to make a break from the facility, they encounter soldiers outside the gates. There's a rapidly spreading infectious disease outside, and no one can leave their houses or travel without a permit. Which means that they're stuck at Hope. And this time, no one is watching out for them at all. As supplies quickly dwindle and a deadly plague tears through their ranks, the group has to decide whom among them they can trust and figure out how they can survive in a world that has never wanted them in the first place. Also by Marieke Nijkamp: This Is Where It Ends Even If We Break Before I Let Go Praise for Marieke Nijkamp: "Immersive and captivating. Thrilling in every sense of the word."—Karen M. McManus, #1 New York Times bestselling author of One of Us is Lying on Even If We Break "With exceptional handling of everything from mental illness to guilt and a riveting, magic realist narrative, this well wrought, haunting novel will stick with readers long after the final page."—Booklist on Before I Let Go *STARRED REVIEW* "A compelling, brutal story of an unfortunately all-too familiar situation: a school shooting. Nijkamp portrays the events thoughtfully, recounting fifty-four intense minutes of bravery, love, and loss."—BookRiot on This Is Where It Ends
