While other children's religious titles focus on Saint Francis of Assisi as an adult, few, if any, have concentrated on the early life of the patron saint of animals and the environment. Stunning illustrations punctuate this beautifully told story of Saint Francis as a boy as he communes with nature and treats even the fiercest of animals--a hungry wolf--with the same compassion he would show his grandmother. In a fearless display of courage, tolerance, and understanding, the young Francis makes peace with the wolf, foreshadowing his teachings of harmony with the world around us and man's duty to protect nature.
Sisterhood, motherhood, marriage, baking, and books—these are a few of the things that make this delightful novel a recipe for getting through the tough stuff of life—from the author of The Summer Sail and The Summer of Good Intentions. Ellen McClarety, a recent divorcée, has opened a new bake shop in her small Midwestern town, hoping to turn her life around by dedicating herself to the traditional Danish pastry called kringle. She is no longer saddled by her ne’er-do-well husband, but the past still haunts her—sometimes by showing up on her doorstep. Her younger sister, Lanie, is a successful divorce attorney with a baby at home. But Lanie is beginning to feel that her perfect life is not as perfect as it seems. Both women long for the guidance of their mother, who died years ago but left them with lasting memories of her love and a wonderful piece of advice: “At the end of every day, you can always think of three good things that happened.” Ellen and Lanie are as close as two sisters can be, until one begins keeping a secret that could forever change both their lives. Wearing her big Midwestern heart proudly on her sleeve, Wendy Francis skillfully illuminates the emotional lives of two women with humor and compassion, weaving a story destined to be shared with a friend, a mother, or a sister.
"A brilliant, powerful elegy from a living brother to a lost one, yet pulsing with rhythm, and beating with life." --Marlon James "Highly recommend Brother by David Chariandy--concise and intense, elegiac short novel of devastation and hope." --Joyce Carol Oates, via Twitter WINNER--Toronto Book Award WINNER--Rogers' Writers' Trust Fiction Prize WINNER--Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction In luminous, incisive prose, a startling new literary talent explores masculinity, race, and sexuality against a backdrop of simmering violence during the summer of 1991. One sweltering summer in the Park, a housing complex outside of Toronto, Michael and Francis are coming of age and learning to stomach the careless prejudices and low expectations that confront them as young men of black and brown ancestry. While their Trinidadian single mother works double, sometimes triple shifts so her boys might fulfill the elusive promise of their adopted home, Francis helps the days pass by inventing games and challenges, bringing Michael to his crew's barbershop hangout, and leading escapes into the cool air of the Rouge Valley, a scar of green wilderness where they are free to imagine better lives for themselves. Propelled by the beats and styles of hip hop, Francis dreams of a future in music. Michael's dreams are of Aisha, the smartest girl in their high school whose own eyes are firmly set on a life elsewhere. But the bright hopes of all three are violently, irrevocably thwarted by a tragic shooting, and the police crackdown and suffocating suspicion that follow. Honest and insightful in its portrayal of kinship, community, and lives cut short, David Chariandy's Brother is an emotional tour de force that marks the arrival of a stunning new literary voice.
Francis Bacon was one of the most powerful and enigmatic creative geniuses of the twentieth century. Immediately recognizable, his paintings continue to challenge interpretations and provoke controversy. Bacon was also an extraordinary personality. Generous but cruel, forthright yet manipulative, ebullient but in despair: He was the sum of his contradictions. This life, lived at extremes, was filled with achievement and triumph, misfortune and personal tragedy. In his revised and updated edition of an already brilliant biography, Michael Peppiatt has drawn on fresh material that has become available in the sixteen years since the artist’s death. Most important, he includes confidential material given to him by Bacon but omitted from the first edition. Francis Bacon derives from the hundreds of occasions Bacon and Peppiatt sat conversing, often late into the night, over many years, and particularly when Bacon was working in Paris. We are also given insight into Bacon’s intimate relationships, his artistic convictions and views on life, as well as his often acerbic comments on his contemporaries.
Francis Spufford's Unapologetic is a wonderfully pugnacious defense of Christianity. Refuting critics such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the "new atheist" crowd, Spufford, a former atheist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, argues that Christianity is recognizable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the grown-up dignity of Christian experience. Fans of C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, Marilynne Robinson, Mary Karr, Diana Butler Bass, Rob Bell, and James Martin will appreciate Spufford's crisp, lively, and abashedly defiant thesis. Unapologetic is a book for believers who are fed up with being patronized, for non-believers curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century, and for anyone who feels there is something indefinably wrong, literalistic, anti-imaginative and intolerant about the way the atheist case is now being made.
Janet kept hearing a baby cry, went to investigate and found a new borne still attached to its mother. The mother seemed to be dead, so Janet, cut the cord, wrapped the baby up and took him away to raise. She raised him without any complications until he was to start college, then. he needed a birth certificate. Find out how this was obtained and how later Michaels biological mother found him. Michaels life took many turns along the way.
Alessandro Paolo Perucci's latest work is a spellbinding horror novel, THE HAUNTING OF SISTER MARY FRANCIS PART I which tells of a young lonely Catholic schoolgirl named Mary Francis who is teased by the popular girls in her school called the Click for being meek and awkward. Mary Francis has six pitbull terrier pups named Gentle Soul, Lion, Sickle, Justice, Terror, and Three Eyes who are as meek as she. After being tormented to a boiling point, she meets a charasmatic defrocked priest named Father Gregory Martin who persuades her to join the world of the occult. He shows her the evil Infernal Book of Wisdom and a frightening sword called the Cadaver Sword which can give her tremendous powers. She is swept away by Father Gregory Martin and sells her soul to the Devil, uses the sword's power and thereby transforms into the gouged out eyed demon nun spectre Sister Mary Francis who wears a sentient birdlike nun's habit that is an omen of the Demon Nun's presence. Her Pitbull Terriers are also transformed into monstrous sized Demon Dogs who have a penchant for terror. Now she will get revenge on anyone and everyone who hurt her. Watch out, the demon nun spectre Sister Mary Francis will get you.
The Prophet is the third volume in this extraordinary series of "the writings of Saint Francis and those of the early Franciscan witnesses" and it will "be of estimable value to scholars, students, and lovers of Il Poverello as well...a scholarly achievement done in the service of history, theology and spirituality." (Lawrence Cunningham)
Into the Vines is a novel of discovery, personal triumph and heroism. French Bleu, a vintage-jazz nightclub in Paris offers a reprieve to its inhabitants from death, illness and captivity. Olivier is a pilot who rescues stranded and desperate souls from famine and war torn areas of Africa, while Daniela, a young nurse, seeks that which is amiss in her own life. Brie, a strong woman, must find a destiny which awaits her own ambition. She celebrates a milestone birthday after encountering an illness, bringing grace and experience in her search for something more. Daniela dreamed. I want to be as confident as Brie on a sunny day in Savannah in the summertime. From the vineyard cooking school in the garden-like Loire Valley, where these three lives meet, to the streets of Paris, where fate brings blessings from angst and longing. This story revels in realism. This sanctuary seemingly held an inspirational deity as they witnessed a spiritual unity on the Ceremonial Cliffs. Hawa dreams of flying a plane someday, while Francis possesses natural talents of the musical kind. Together they keep a secret for fear of retribution. I heard LOVE lasts forever and my mom says there are all kinds of love. So maybe you should find another kind of love, since your first love lasted forever, said Francis.
