This rambunctious first novel by the author of the bestselling Corelli's Mandolin is set in an impoverished, violent, yet ravishingly beautiful country somewhere in South America. When the haughty Dona Constanza decides to divert a river to fill her swimming pool, the consequences are at once tragic, heroic, and outrageously funny. "Walks a precarious edge between slapstick and pathos, never once losing its balance."--Washington Post Book World.
Novel about the coping mechanisms of a woman longing for death but stuck with life. A stroke has robbed Beverly of speech, movement and the loss of one eye. She uses her enforced time in the hydrotherapy pool to imagine parallel realities, drawing her inspiration from the other women in the pool. She hopes to create a reality she can escape into entirely, but is unable to keep her own memories from intruding into the narrative. Explores themes of truth and fiction. Author's previous titles include the novels for teenagers 'A Long Way To Tipperary' and 'Wyrd'. This is her first adult novel.
Delora November is a survivor--ask anyone in Redstar, Alabama, and they will tell you that. Her ex-husband put her in a burn ward and she came fighting back. She works three jobs and on the surface she's keeping it together. Redstar itself works its own magic. When the thought of yet another hospital is too much, Delora turns to healer women she's heard might help. In the quiet, breathing depths of Bayou Lisse she meets Sophie Cofe. It seems like magic indeed when Delora finds answers to questions she had yet to ask and cures for ills she had thought beyond fixing. But underneath her happiness there is still a lurking evil that can take away everything Delora--and Sophie--hold dear.
Selected as a Mission Specialist in 1978 in the first group of shuttle astronauts, Mike Mullane completed three missions and logged 356 hours aboard the Discovery and Atlantis shuttles. It was a dream come true. As a boy, Mullane could only read about space travel in science fiction, but the launch of Sputnik changed all that. Space flight became a possible dream and Mike Mullane set out to make it come true. In this absorbing memoir, Mullane gives the first-ever look into the often hilarious, sometime volatile dynamics of space shuttle astronauts - a class that included Vietnam War veterans, feminists, and propeller-headed scientists. With unprecedented candour, Mullane describes the chilling fear and unparalleled joy of space flight. As his career centred around the Challenger disaster, Mullane also recounts the heartache of burying his friends and colleagues. And he pulls no punches as he reveals the ins and outs of NASA, frank in his criticisms of the agency. A blast from start to finish, Riding Rockets is a straight-from-the-gut account of what it means to be an astronaut, just in time for this latest generation of stargazers.
*Carrion crows in the Japanese city of Sendai have learned to use passing traffic to crack nuts. *Lizards in Puerto Rico are evolving feet that better grip surfaces like concrete. *Europe’s urban blackbirds sing at a higher pitch than their rural cousins, to be heardover the din of traffic. How is this happening? Menno Schilthuizen is one of a growing number of “urban ecologists” studying how our manmade environments are accelerating and changing the evolution of the animals and plants around us. In Darwin Comes to Town, he takes us around the world for an up-close look at just how stunningly flexible and swift-moving natural selection can be. With human populations growing, we’re having an increasing impact on global ecosystems, and nowhere do these impacts overlap as much as they do in cities. The urban environment is about as extreme as it gets, and the wild animals and plants that live side-by-side with us need to adapt to a whole suite of challenging conditions: they must manage in the city’s hotter climate (the “urban heat island”); they need to be able to live either in the semidesert of the tall, rocky, and cavernous structures we call buildings or in the pocket-like oases of city parks (which pose their own dangers, including smog and free-rangingdogs and cats); traffic causes continuous noise, a mist of fine dust particles, and barriers to movement for any animal that cannot fly or burrow; food sources are mainly human-derived. And yet, as Schilthuizen shows, the wildlife sharing these spaces with us is not just surviving, but evolving ways of thriving. Darwin Comes toTown draws on eye-popping examples of adaptation to share a stunning vision of urban evolution in which humans and wildlife co-exist in a unique harmony. It reveals that evolution can happen far more rapidly than Darwin dreamed, while providing a glimmer of hope that our race toward over population might not take the rest of nature down with us.
Erica S. Perl and Henry Cole team up once again to deliver spot-on humor with their unforgettable chicken character. In this cheeky (sorry!) sequel to the wildly fun Chicken Butt!, the young jokester and his chicken muse are back, but this time they're trying to trick Mom. She thinks she has caught on to the gag, but as she distractedly does the grocery shopping, she falls victim to a flurry of jokes using homonyms and homophones—words such as "dear" and "deer," and "which" and "witch." Wordplay has never been so much fun. Like Chicken Butt!, this story encourages children to participate in a call-and-response reading format that reinforces their reading skills. Praise for Chicken Butt's Back! "Coles’ tickled-pink cartoonish artwork gets right into the mix, the chocolate chip to the cookie dough. The denouement is so merrily explosive that just to imagine the shrieking voices of a read-aloud is mightily cheering.” –Kirkus Reviews “Cole's kinetic, acrylic and colored pencil cartoons strike the right tone of mild disobedience.” –Publishers Weekly “Fans of Chicken Butt! are going to love this sequel. This is the kind of book that siblings will beg to read to each other, especially since it’s set up for two voices.” –School Library Journal
Here's everything you ever wanted to know about Hell . . . but were too afraid to ask! What tortures will we find? How hot is it, really? And how can we assure it's not our final destination? Drawing from the Bible, as well as many other sources, an expert on Scripture provides an illuminating, learned, at-times-hilarious look at the eternal realm of damnation.
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY BOOKPAGE AND LIBRARY JOURNAL The Crimson Petal and the White meets Fight Club: A page-turning novel set in the world of female pugilists and their patrons in late eighteenth-century England. Moving from a filthy brothel to a fine manor house, from the world of street fighters to the world of champions, The Fair Fight is a vivid, propulsive historical novel announcing the arrival of a dynamic new talent. Born in a brothel, Ruth doesn’t expect much for herself beyond abuse. While her sister’s beauty affords a certain degree of comfort, Ruth’s harsh looks set her on a path of drudgery. That is until she meets pugilist patron George Dryer and discovers her true calling—fighting bare knuckles in the prize rings of Bristol. Manor-born Charlotte has a different cross to bear. Scarred by smallpox, stifled by her social and romantic options, and trapped in twisted power games with her wastrel brother, she is desperate for an escape. After a disastrous, life-changing fight sidelines Ruth, the two women meet, and it alters the perspectives of both of them. When Charlotte presents Ruth with an extraordinary proposition, Ruth pushes dainty Charlotte to enter the ring herself and learn the power of her own strength. A gripping, page-turning story about people struggling to transcend the circumstances into which they were born and fighting for their own places in society, The Fair Fight is a raucous, intoxicating tale of courage, reinvention, and fighting one’s way to the top.
