Beloved novelist Marcia Willett continues to captivate readers with her inspiring novels about family, friendship, and love. In Postcards from the Past Siblings Billa and Ed share their beautiful, grand old childhood home in rural Cornwall. With family and friends nearby, and their living arrangements free and easy, they seem as contented as they can be. But when postcards start arriving from a sinister figure they thought belonged well and truly in their pasts, old memories are stirred. Why is he contacting them now? And what has he been hiding all these years?
The Notebook meets Love & Gelato in this heart-wrenching novel “full of deep romance and searing tragedy” (Kirkus Reviews) about a teen girl who travels to her late mother’s majestic summertime home to learn of the romance—and the tragedy—that changed her life forever. Seventeen-year-old Lexi has always wanted to know more about the mother who passed away when she was only a child. But her dad will barely talk about her. He says he’d rather live in the present with Lexi, her stepmom, and her half-brother. Lexi loves her family, too, but is it so wrong to want to learn about the mom she never got to know? When Lexi’s grandma dies and secretly leaves her a worn blue chest that belonged to Lexi’s mother, Lexi is ecstatic to find a treasure trove of keepsakes. Her mom held onto letters, pamphlets, flyers, and news articles all from the same beautiful summertime getaway: Mackinac Island—plus a cryptic postcard that hints at a forbidden romance. If Lexi wants answers, this island is where she needs to go. Without telling her dad, Lexi goes to the gorgeous Mackinac Island in Lake Huron, reachable only by ferry. Cars are forbidden and bikes are the number one mode of transportation along the quaint cobblestone streets, and the magical hotel that rests alongside cozy cafés and bookshops. While following her mother’s footsteps, Lexi befriends an elderly former Broadway star and a charming young hotel worker while quickly falling in love with her surroundings. But though the island may be beautiful, it’s hiding unfortunate secrets—some with her mother at the center. Could some questions be best left buried beneath the blue waters?
The project that captured a nation's imagination. The instructions were simple, but the results were extraordinary. "You are invited to anonymously contribute a secret to a group art project. Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything -- as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before. Be brief. Be legible. Be creative." It all began with an idea Frank Warren had for a community art project. He began handing out postcards to strangers and leaving them in public places -- asking people to write down a secret they had never told anyone and mail it to him, anonymously. The response was overwhelming. The secrets were both provocative and profound, and the cards themselves were works of art -- carefully and creatively constructed by hand. Addictively compelling, the cards reveal our deepest fears, desires, regrets, and obsessions. Frank calls them "graphic haiku," beautiful, elegant, and small in structure but powerfully emotional. As Frank began posting the cards on his website, PostSecret took on a life of its own, becoming much more than a simple art project. It has grown into a global phenomenon, exposing our individual aspirations, fantasies, and frailties -- our common humanity. Every day dozens of postcards still make their way to Frank, with postmarks from around the world, touching on every aspect of human experience. This extraordinary collection brings together the most powerful, personal, and beautifully intimate secrets Frank Warren has received -- and brilliantly illuminates that human emotions can be unique and universal at the same time.
The history of Wheeling and Ohio County is both eclectic and engaging. Beginning in the colonial era when the legendary Betty Zane saved Fort Henry from an Indian attack by hiding gunpowder in her skirt, Wheeling eventually emerged as an important link between Eastern cities and the rest of the United States. The Wheeling Suspension Bridge, the Old National Road, and the B&O Railroad all passed through the bustling Ohio County. Over the years, Wheeling has been labeled everything from "Victorian Wheeling" to "Sintown USA," and these monikers represent the diverse qualities of a town molded and shaped by the steel, coal, tobacco, and transportation industries. Whether residents and visitors frequented the impressive Victorian mansions or Wheeling's infamous brothel district, they always had something to write home about. The incomparable collection showcased in this book spans five decades and was begun and continued by the Carney family.
Exploring the meaning of borders in our world.?What are borders? Are they simply political and geographical, marked by posts, walls and fences, or should we think of them more broadly? Consider the borders within countries, marked by race, ethnicity, or caste. Borders may be physical and economic, and even perceptual-the borders of our minds. ?In Postcards from the Borderlands, historian and journalist David Mould rambles through a dozen countries in Asia, Southern Africa and Eastern Europe by car, bus, train, shared taxi and ferry, exploring what borders mean to their peoples.?Mould finds topics of interest even in the most ordinary places-an airport departure lounge, a food court, a roadside restaurant, a government office. Every road trip offers a moving window display of landscape features, crops, livestock, houses, churches, temples, mosques, schools, factories, military bases, vehicles. He notes what people are selling on the roadside and the markets, the restaurant menu, the indecipherable instructions for the TV remote in his hotel room. What people wear. What they eat. How they talk to each other. The questions they ask him. The questions he asks them. Away from the tourist hotspots, he finds that it is often the commonplace that is most fascinating and revealing of culture.
E. Annie Proulx's first novel, Postcards, winner of the 1993 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction, tells the mesmerizing tale of Loyal Blood, who misspends a lifetime running from a crime so terrible that it renders him forever incapable of touching a woman. Blood's odyssey begins in 1944 and takes him across the country from his hardscrabble Vermont hill farm to New York, across Ohio, Minnesota, and Montana to British Columbia, on to North Dakota, Wyoming, and New Mexico and ends, today, in California, with Blood homeless and near mad. Along the way, he must live a hundred lives to survive, mining gold, growing beans, hunting fossils and trapping, prospecting for uranium, and ranching. In his absence, disaster befalls his family; greatest among their terrible losses are the hard-won values of endurance and pride that were the legacy of farm people rooted in generations of intimacy with soil, weather, plants, and seasons. Postcards chronicles the lives of the rural and the dispossessed and charts their territory with the historical verisimilitude and writerly prowess of Cather, Dreiser, and Faulkner. It is a new American classic.
Have YOU gotten a postcard from Waldo yet? The iconic traveler takes fans on a whirlwind tour with this cool collection of thirty postcards. Who better than Waldo to be pictured on a postcard boasting of world travels? Armchair tourists, real-life travelers, and Waldo aficionados will want to get their hands on these thirty pull-out postcards, featuring artwork from some of the best-loved spreads in the Where’s Waldo? books. True to form, each postcard features prompts on the back to get the recipients searching for the bespectacled traveler and a few other items as well.
The unique sights, smells and sounds of the famous city are the luminous backdrop to these eleven tales whose colourful characters are lured to the City of Light and Love, like moths to a flame. A young waiter leaves the French countryside in search of fame and fortune. A single woman leaves her home country behind in a last chance search for meaning and love. In German occupied Paris an officer is lodged in the house of a defiant young Frenchwoman. The extravagance and glamour of café society masks the fate of a Texan heiress. In a sweeping time-span from the bohemian 1920's and 30's, through the traumatic war years, the new dawn of the 1950's and 60's, right up to current day; these are stories of yearning and longing where hopes and dreams are kindled by the powerful mystique of Paris. And within each story is a simple postcard which may have dramatic consequences.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A high-stakes hide-and-seek competition turns deadly in this “marvelously creepy thrill ride of a book that keeps twisting until the very end” (Karen M. McManus, author of One of Us Is Lying) “The suspenseful plot combines elements of Thomas Tryon’s classic Harvest Home, Netflix’s Squid Game, and the social commentary of Jordan Peele’s film oeuvre and mixes these with a revelatory pacing reminiscent of Spielberg’s Jaws.”—Booklist The challenge: Spend a week hiding in an abandoned amusement park and don’t get caught. The prize: enough money to change everything. Even though everyone is desperate to win—to seize a dream future or escape a haunting past—Mack is sure she can beat her competitors. All she has to do is hide, and she’s an expert at that. It’s the reason she’s alive and her family isn’t. But as the people around her begin disappearing one by one, Mack realizes that this competition is even more sinister than she imagined, and that together might be the only way to survive. Fourteen competitors. Seven days. Everywhere to hide but nowhere to run. Come out, come out, wherever you are.
