Cathy is a homeless woman with a passion and a gift for helping others. While living in a shelter, she meets Tom, a homeless man, and the two form a friendship that soon becomes romantic. Cathy's life is finally looking up, and soon she and Tom are married and living in a home of their own. But her life is suddenly thrown back into turmoil: the death of their firstborn followed by Tom's unexpected death and her own serious illness. After each of these tragedies she finds the courage to get back up. But how can she ever go on without her soul mate? Why would God allow these things to happen? Through it all, Cathy holds on to what her mother told her before she died -- that there was a secret about Cathy that God would reveal in His time.
Emma - I know it sounds crazy. You (and Mum!) will be wondering where I've been disappearing to, and when I'll be back. That's why I'm leaving you all this evidence - in case something happens and I DON'T come back. Look at everything in my book. Call the phone numbers. Check out the websites. But, you can't tell ANYBODY about it, unless you want to end up in over your head, like me. But don't worry, I'll be OK (I think). Hey, maybe this is the beginning of a new life for me. For sure it's the end of the old one. Call me. Love, Cathy This book reaches beyond the written word to interact with teenage girls in ways they are quite familiar with in other areas of their lives. From instant-messaging to text-messaging, from surfing the web to having their own sites, the age-old story of 'boy dumps girl and girl wins boy back' is lifted from the page to our three-dimensional, 21st-century world.
From the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author comes the poignant and shocking memoir of Cathy's recent relationship with Tayo, a young boy she fosters whose good behaviour and polite manners hide a terrible past. Tayo arrives at Cathy's with only the clothes he stands up in. He has been brought to her by the police, but he is calm, polite, and very well spoken, and not at all like the children she normally fosters. The social worker gives Cathy the forms which should contain Tayo's history, but apart from his name and age, it is blank. Tayo has no past. Tayo is an 'invisible' child, kidnapped from his loving father in Nigeria and brought illegally to the UK by his drink and drugs dependent prostitute mother, where he is put to work in a sweat shop in Central London. When he sustains an injury and is no longer earning, he is cast out. When Cathy takes Tayo to school he points out a dozen different addresses where he has stayed in the last six months, often being left alone. Tayo lies, and manipulates situations to his own advantage and Cathy has to be continually on guard. Tayo's social worker searches all computer databases but there is no record of Tayo - he has only attended school for 3 terms and has never seen a doctor. He and his mother have been evading the authorities by living 'underground'. With his mother recently released from prison, Tayo is desperate to live with his father in Nigeria, but no one can track him down or even prove that he exists.
*The must-have third book in the gorgeous Lost and Found series from Cathy Cassidy, bestselling author of the Chocolate Box Girls* Sasha has it all. She's the lead singer of an amazing band and the coolest boy in school has a crush on her. Nobody notices that Sasha's starting to feel overwhelmed. When a world-famous rock star invites the band to record music at his country mansion and Sasha starts having blackouts, she knows she won't be able to keep her anxiety hidden for much longer. With the fate of the Lost & Found in her hands, will Sasha's secret tear them apart?
A family of Russian refugees juggle their haunting past with their challenging present in this novel by the author of My Very Best Friend. Sometimes Toni Kozlovsky and her sisters know what each other is thinking, just when they need it most. Since Toni, Valerie, and Ellie were little girls growing up in Communist Russia, their parents have insisted it’s simply further proof that the Kozlovskys are special and different. Now a reporter, Toni lives on a yellow tugboat on Oregon’s Willamette River. As far as her parents are concerned, the pain of their old life and their dangerous escape should remain buried in the Moscow they left behind, as should the mysterious past of their adopted brother, Dmitry. But lately, Toni’s talent for putting on a smile isn’t enough to keep memories at bay. Valerie, a prosecuting attorney, wages constant war against the wrongs she could do nothing about as a child. Youngest sister Ellie is engaged to marry an Italian, breaking her mother’s heart in the process. Toni fears she’s about to lose her home, while the hard-edged DEA agent down the dock keeps trying to break through her reserve. Meanwhile, beneath the culture clashes and endearing quirks within her huge, noisy, loving family are deeper secrets that Toni has sworn to keep—even from the one person she longs to help most . . . “Lamb . . . draws readers into the embrace of Toni's eccentric and loud extended family, who inject regular bouts of humor into the story while their love for one another is palpable . . . . The joy of this intricate story is following these characters and their warm and compelling development . . . ” —Library Journal
The "wise, warm, compassionate" new novel--full of secrets, lies and family ties--from international bestselling author Cathy Kelly (Marian Keyes). Bess is happy and in love with her new husband Edward, a recent widow. However, when she plans a big celebration for Edward's birthday, this May-December romance goes into a tailspin. She quickly realizes that joining a family isn't going to be as easy as she thought. Especially when it comes to getting along with her step-daughter, Jojo, who can't seem to come to terms with her fathers new marriage, all the while battling inner-demons of her own. Jojo relies on her cousin Cari, a fierce career-woman who isn't unnerved by anything except for facing the man who left her at the alter--the man who Bess invited to the party. Thanks to laughter, tears and a big surprise, the Brannigans might just discover the secrets of a happy marriage. . . But will they find out before it's too late?
Essays by adult women writers explore their secret lives as teenagers: secret confessions about parental unhappiness and infidelity, mental illness in the family, alcoholism and threats to self-esteem.
This provocative book posits a new theory of women's writing characterized by what Claire Raymond calls 'the posthumous voice.'This suggestive term evokes the way that women's writing both forefronts and hides the author's implied body within and behind the written work. Tracing the use of the disembodied posthumous voice in fiction and poetry by Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath, Raymond's study sounds out the ways that the trope of the posthumous voice succeeds in negotiating the difficult cultural space between the concept of woman's body and the production of canonical literature. Arguing that the nineteenth-century cult of mourning opens to women's writing the possibility of a post-Romantic 'self-elegy,' Raymond explores how the woman writer's appropriation and alteration of elegiac conventions signifies and revises her disrupted relationship to audience. Theorizing the posthumous voice as a gesture by which the woman writer claims, and in some cases gains, canonicity, Raymond contends that the elegy posed as if written by a dead woman for herself both describes and subverts the woman writer's secondary status in the English canon. For the woman writer, the self-elegy permits access to a topos central to canonical literature, with the implementation of the trope of the posthumous voice marking a crucial site of woman's interaction with the English canon.
They all hide secrets that won't go away.... From the outside, the welcoming, garden-adorned houses of Summer Street are the picture of Irish charm. But on the inside, unexpected and heartbreaking secrets swirl. At house number thirty-two, hardworking, single-mother Faye Reid conceals the truth about her marriage from her fiery daughter, Amber. But Amber, a budding artist, also hides something from her all-too-trusting mother: a relationship with a rock star hopeful for whom she plans to throw away her future. And at number forty-eight, Maggie Maguire arrives at her childhood home to help her sick mother, a welcome distraction from the life she left behind and the startling secret she's hiding -- from herself. And only become harder to keep... At thirty-four Summer Street, wise and kind Christie Devlin has the remarkable ability to see into the lives and hearts of others -- and may have the answers when her neighbors' carefully hidden secrets bubble to the surface. But when Christie's own past comes back to haunt her -- posing a threat to her picture-perfect marriage -- this time the answers aren't as clear.
