A powerful literary debut inspired by a true story. In 1898, Alaska is an untamed wilderness with an unforgiving climate. At the tail end of a world-wide depression, thousands of destitute people are drawn north by rumors of easy wealth coming out of the remote claims of the Gold Rush. Many of the pilgrims are unprepared for the hardships that await them and find nothing but a desolate landscape already pillaged of its riches by those who came before. Hannah Nelson, a beautiful young Englishwoman, is one of the late arrivals. After following her husband to a glacier-wracked fjord in the company of three equally desperate men, she discovers that gold is only one of the desires that can consume a person's soul...
While Kate pens an evocative historical novel based on family journals, her neighbor, Emily, flees a volatile relationship to an island in the Adirondacks where she, Kate, and Kate's mother, Birdie, face the consequences of their pasts.
The perfect anti-valentine: a whirlwind tour through love’s most crushing moments What’s the best way to mend a broken heart? Forget ice cream, wine, and sappy movies. Journalist Meghan Laslocky advises: Read through the pain. From forbidden love in 12th century Paris to the art of crafting the perfect “I’m over you” mix, The Little Book of Heartbreak is a quirky exploration of all things lovelorn, including: • How serial cheater Ernest Hemingway stole his wife’s job just as their marriage was collapsing • Kinky spells cast by lovesick men in ancient Greece • Painter Oscar Kokoschka’s attempt to get over an ex by creating (and having liaisons with!) her life-size replica • Brooding crooner Morrissey’s personal creed about how romantic love is useless • The surprising science behind heartbreak and love addiction • The connection between World War II and what you talk about with your therapist • Insights into the tricky chemistry of monogamy and infidelity, courtesy of tiny rodents • And other lessons learned from ill-fated romances, lovers’ quarrels, and hell-hath-no-fury spats throughout the ages Featuring anecdotes from history, literature, culture, art and music, The Little Book of Heartbreak shares the entertaining, empowering and occasionally absurd things that happen when love is on its last legs.
From the bestselling author of A Pledge of Silence comes a story of resistance, intrigue, and risking it all in the WWII Philippines. December 1941. War has erupted in the Pacific, spelling danger for Gina Capelli Thorpe, an American expat living in Manila. When the Japanese invade and her husband goes missing, Gina flees with her daughter to the Zambales Mountains to avoid capture--or worse. Desperate for money, medicine, and guns, the resistance recruits Gina to join their underground army and smuggles her back to Manila. There, she forges a new identity and opens a nightclub, where seductive beauties sing, dance, and tease secrets out of high-ranking Japanese officers while the wildly successful club and its enemy patrons help fund the resistance. But operating undercover in the spotlight has Gina struggling to stay a step ahead of the Japanese. She's risked everything to take a stand, but her club is a house of cards in the eye of a storm. Can Gina keep this delicate operation running long enough to outlast the enemy, or is she on a sure path to defeat that will put her family, her freedom, or even her life at risk?
Secrets never stay buried for long... Lucy Harper has always been good at one thing: running from her past. But when her beloved Nana Lily passes away she has no choice except to return to the one place in the world she most wants to avoid...
landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias Press, 2015) is poet Michelle Penaloza's first book. Praise For landscape/heartbreak: Peñaloza's poignantly beautiful landscape/heartbreak is more than a suite of breakup poems, its own veritable tradition in American poetry. Hers is a sequence that plumbs the meaning of what it means to love, sacrificing to secret away bits and pieces of one's self whose other parts remain scattered on corners, in parks, and bridges. This collection is about the business of reconciling memories and ghosts, the toughness in learning how to breathe again. -Major Jackson I've been in love with landscape/heartbreak since before it was written, from the moment I first learned of Michelle Peñaloza's wild idea: to map heartbreak. What if strangers told their stories while wandering the avenues and backstreets of a city? What if trauma could be healed one footfall at a time? Peñaloza enacts an urban alchemy, transforming the walkers' personal struggles into art and thereby coming closer to her own persistent ghosts. A collection for anyone who has ever had her (or his) heart stomped on. This means most of us. A powerful and exciting debut. -Susan Rich The question-"What hurt you into poetry?"-lies at the center of Michelle Peñaloza's landscape/heartbreak. And her poems urge us to seek the answer, following Peñaloza's speaker on her sojourn where walking and breathing create the meditative cadence to lull the body into the ecstatic state necessary for conjuration. From the beauty of these poems emerge the ghosts of those loves that have splintered us into jagged pieces. As we traverse Peñaloza's lyrical landscape, the "sueded/beads of unopened wild poppies" and "renegade ferns/growing upon the stumps of old docks" smooth over the serrated edges of what cuts us deep. This is a marvelous and haunting collection. -Oliver de la Paz As you read this remarkable collection, you might think that each poem begins with two people walking through a city. But then, dear reader, you realize that it's no longer two people in the distance, for you've been invited on the journey as well. These poems will transport you like that, and then they'll walk beside you through a landscape of heartache and longing. While there, "You can look back," Peñaloza writes, "remember the stories beneath all this shine." And these stories do shine. And you will remember them. -Matthew Olzmann
On the two hundredth anniversary of her birth, a landmark biography transforms Charlotte Brontë from a tragic figure into a modern heroine. Charlotte Brontë famously lived her entire life in an isolated parsonage on a remote English moor with a demanding father and siblings whose astonishing childhood creativity was a closely held secret. The genius of Claire Harman’s biography is that it transcends these melancholy facts to reveal a woman for whom duty and piety gave way to quiet rebellion and fierce ambition. Drawing on letters unavailable to previous biographers, Harman depicts Charlotte’s inner life with absorbing, almost novelistic intensity. She seizes upon a moment in Charlotte’s adolescence that ignited her determination to reject poverty and obscurity: While working at a girls’ school in Brussels, Charlotte fell in love with her married professor, Constantin Heger, a man who treated her as “nothing special to him at all.” She channeled her torment into her first attempts at a novel and resolved to bring it to the world's attention. Charlotte helped power her sisters’ work to publication, too. But Emily’s Wuthering Heights was eclipsed by Jane Eyre, which set London abuzz with speculation: Who was this fiery author demanding love and justice for her plain and insignificant heroine? Charlotte Brontë’s blazingly intelligent women brimming with hidden passions would transform English literature. And she savored her literary success even as a heartrending series of personal losses followed. Charlotte Brontë is a groundbreaking view of the beloved writer as a young woman ahead of her time. Shaped by Charlotte’s lifelong struggle to claim love and art for herself, Harman’s richly insightful biography offers readers many of the pleasures of Brontë’s own work.
From the author of Wildflower Hill, this breathtaking novel travels more than a century between two love stories set in the Australian seaside town of Lighthouse Bay. FROM THE AUTHOR OF WILDFLOWER HILL, THIS BREATHTAKING NOVEL TRAVELS MORE THAN A CENTURY BETWEEN TWO LOVE STORIES SET IN THE AUSTRALIAN SEASIDE TOWN OF LIGHTHOUSE BAY. In 1901, a ship sinks off the coast of Lighthouse Bay in Australia. The only survivor is Isabella Winterbourne—escaping her loveless marriage and the devastating loss of her son—who clutches a priceless gift meant for the Australian Parliament. Suddenly, this gift could be her ticket to a new life, free from the bonds of her husband and his overbearing family. One hundred years later, Libby Slater leaves her life in Paris to return to her hometown of Lighthouse Bay. Living in the cottage that was purchased by her recently passed lover, she hopes to heal her broken heart and reconcile with her sister, Juliet. Libby did something so unforgivable twenty years ago, Juliet is unsure if she can ever trust her sister again. In this adventurous love story spanning centuries, both Isabella and Libby must learn that letting go of the past is the only way to move into the future.
Bridesmaids meets Lost in this compelling novella about a destination bachelorette party gone awry from the author of Losing the Light, one of Redbook’s Best Books of 2016. Hannah—knee-deep in nailing down catering plans and floral arrangements for her upcoming nuptials—is ready for some R&R. Stealing off to a quiet, secluded island off the coast of Washington state for good wine and fresh air with her four best friends seems like the perfect way to spend her bachelorette weekend. But the island may have other ideas. Halfway through the trip, the bride-to-be mysteriously disappears, leaving the bridesmaids confused and increasingly panicked. To make matters worse, there’s something…amiss about the house they’re staying in. As the tension rises, personalities clash, secrets spill out, and the girls begin seeing and hearing things they can’t explain. While Hannah’s friends desperately try to discover what has happened to her, an ominous storm rolls in that could trap them on the island indefinitely. Now the girls who came to celebrate with Hannah begin to wonder, is she going to make it to the wedding? Is she going to make it home at all?
From the USA Today bestselling "master of witty banter" (Entertainment Weekly) comes a hilarious and heartwarming romance about a big city doctor who never expected to find the man of her dreams in the tiny town of Matchmaker Bay. Dr. Nora Walsh has just been dumped in spectacular fashion, making it the perfect time for a major life change. She figures taking over the medical practice in tiny Matchmaker Bay for a couple of years will help her get over her broken heart, and then she can head back to the big city. But when the first man she sees looks like a superhero god, she wonders if maybe there's something to small-town living after all. Jake Ramsey also has a broken heart -- one he never expects to heal. He doesn't need people anyway and is content hiding out in his secluded cottage on the beach. But after helping Nora with a medical emergency, he finds himself opening up to the witty, warmhearted doctor. Soon the local matchmakers are working overtime to pair them off, and Jake begins to wonder if his campaign to get Nora to stay is for the town or because he can't bear the thought of her leaving.
