Life Age

Dr. Christopher Ringle is the last person you'd expect to find moonlighting as Santa Claus at the mall on the day after Thanksgiving. But it is there that he meets a young man named Molar Alan, who desperately needs a new perspective on the underlying value of Christmas. Dr. Ringle recruits Mo and his older brother as volunteers at a nearby children's hospital for the holiday season. At the hospital Mo is tasked to help bring holiday cheer to the young cancer patients on the fifth floor.

Stefan was just seventeen when he went to prison for the drug-fueled murder of his girlfriend, Belinda. Three years later, he’s released to a world that refuses to let him move on. Belinda’s mother, once Thea’s good friend, galvanizes the community to rally against him to protest in her daughter’s memory. The media paints Stefan as a symbol of white privilege and indifferent justice. Neighbors, employers, even some members of Thea's own family turn away.

Since the Renaissance, people have been plagued by the tense battle between science and religion. Revered evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould suggests, instead of choosing between the two, why not opt for a golden mean that accords dignity and distinction to each realm? With intelligence and clarity, Gould renders the complex simple and sheds new light on this dilemma. In this dazzling gem of contemporary cultural philosophy, Gould posits that science defines the natural world, while religion defines our moral world, and they both can coexist peacefully in respectful noninterference.

Leigh Chen Sanders is absolutely certain about one thing: When her mother died by suicide, she turned into a bird. Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents.

You go to wake up your eighteen-year-old son on Sunday morning for church and you find him dead in his bed. Only later do you learn he bought a single Xanax pill on Snapchat for fifteen dollars to calm his anxiety about the COVID-19 pandemic. He took the pill then ordered food from Door Dash, but he never lived to eat it. It was a counterfeit pill that contained over three times the lethal dose of fentanyl—that one pill killed him.

Salim has always known that his father does not want him. Living with his parents and his adored Uncle Amir in a house full of secrets, he is a bookish child, a dreamer haunted by night terrors. It is the 1970s and Zanzibar is changing. Tourists arrive, the island’s white sands obscuring the memory of recent conflict—the longed-for independence from British colonialism swiftly followed by bloody revolution. When his father moves out, retreating into dishevelled introspection, Salim is confused and ashamed. His mother does not discuss the change.

Teenage sisters Eve and Vera never imagined their summer vacation would be spent in the Arctic, tagging along on their mother’s scientific expedition. But there’s a lot about their lives lately that hasn’t been going as planned, and truth be told, their single mother might not be so happy either. Now in Siberia with a bunch of serious biologists, Eve and Vera are just bored enough to cause trouble. Fooling around in the permafrost, they accidentally discover a perfectly preserved, four-thousand-year-old baby mammoth, and things finally start to get interesting.

Among the people Bateson engages in open-ended, in-depth conversations about aging are a retired Maine boatyard worker who has become a silversmith and maker of fine jewelry; an African American woman who explores the importance of grandmothering; two gay men finding contentment in mutual caring; the retired dean of a cathedral in New York City who exemplifies how a multiplicity of interests and connections lead to deeper unity; and Jane Fonda, who shares her ways of dealing with change and spiritual growth.

In Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow, Damilare Kuku brings her signature humor, boldness, and compassion to each member of this loveable but exasperating family, whose lives reveal the ways in which a woman’s physical appearance can dictate her life and relationships and show just how sharp the double-edged sword of beauty can be.

How do you define the good life? For many, success is measured not by health and happiness but by financial wealth. But such a worldview overlooks the important things in life: personal contentment, family time, spirituality, and the health of the planet and those living on it. A preoccupation with money and possessions is not only unhealthy, it can also drain the true joy from life. In recent years, millions have watched their American Dreams go up in smoke.

Liv Ridgely prides herself on being the responsible wrangler of all things family: stay at home mom, caretaker of elderly parents, supporter of husband Oscar's career, savior of her wayward sister. Now, with her son off to college, and her ambitious daughter, Hazel, a year away from following him, it's Liv's turn. She's even established her dream career of bringing beautiful old homes back to life in the most picturesque part of Maine. Until she learns that 16-year-old Hazel is three months pregnant.

It’s the summer of 1987 in Swift River, and Diamond Newberry is learning how to drive. Ever since her Pop disappeared seven years ago, she and her mother hitchhike everywhere they go. But that’s not the only reason Diamond stands out: she’s teased relentlessly about her weight, and since Pop’s been gone, she is the only Black person in all of Swift River. This summer, Ma is determined to declare Pop legally dead so that they can collect his life insurance money, get their house back from the bank, and finally move on.

They came in summer. They fell upon the land swiftly and suddenly. Through autumn they spread, like locusts, like mice, like a plague. Now its winter. They're still here. But so too are Ellie and Homer and their friends.

Freakishly smart. That’s the unwelcome box Ru Evans is put into for life. After all, she taught herself Euclidean geometry at age seven, has an eidetic memory, and is about to enter college at thirteen years old. Boarding at a house near campus 150 miles from home, Ru meets seventeen-year-old Gabriel, an outsider himself who, like Ru, has trouble making friends—until they form a fast sibling-like bond. Finding a relatable someone in the world to talk to is a first for both of them.

In 1951, a mysterious old woman confronts Pilar Aguirre in the small border town of La Cienega, Texas. The old woman is sure Pilar stole her husband and, in a heated outburst, lays a curse on Pilar and her family. More than forty years later, Lulu Muñoz is dodging chaos at every turn: her troubled father’s moods, his rules, her secret life as singer in a punk band, but most of all her upcoming quinceañera. When her beloved grandmother passes away, Lulu finds herself drawn to the glamorous stranger who crashed the funeral and who lives alone and shunned on the edge of town.

In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was 15, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and exciting and everyone dreamed of going somewhere, she paints a vivid portrait of a particular time and place....

Back home after abruptly leaving graduate school in London, Erin numbly teeters through the shock of losing her best friend to an accident she doesn’t want to talk about—especially with her mother. But it’s easy to slip into the rhythms of Belfast, the lazy city; she takes an au pair job and bookends her days with early morning runs along the Lagan and hazy afters at a bar her old friend tends. In quick succession, she meets an American man who is looking to get lost, and falls back in with the local boy who both comforts and confounds her.

Not many kids have an island in their backyard, but suddenly, the Snolly sisters have three. They’re staying at Granddaddy’s seaside property for the summer, which includes the mysterious Fairy Islands: Fairy, Little Fairy, and Ghost. The people in Misty Cove call them “in-between places,” and say they’re full of magic—a magic that gets inside you. But ten-year-old Bee Snolly doesn’t believe in magic—she just wants to help her ill Granddaddy.

Thirty-four-year-old Harry Crane works as an analyst for the US Forest Service. When his wife dies suddenly, Harry, despairing, retreats north to lose himself in the remote woods of the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania. But fate intervenes in the form of a fiercely determined young girl named Oriana. She and her mother, Amanda, are struggling to pick up the pieces from their own tragic loss of Oriana’s father. Discovering Harry while roaming the forest, Oriana believes that he holds the key to righting her world.

At one of the lowest points in Henri Nouwen’s life, he gave a series of lectures on the importance of following Jesus in an age of anxiety. Drawn from those talks, this new work reveals what sustained Nouwen to remain faithful to the teachings of Jesus and led him to become an icon of compassion and vulnerability. Here, he writes eloquently about calling and purpose, fear and hope. And he explains why - with so many choices available to the 21st-century seeker - the greatest reward for those looking for spiritual direction is rediscovering Jesus’ teaching on love.