Life Age

Ten years ago, Jerry came to New York City to break into show business. Today, his career is stalled, his ex-fiancé is a TV star, and he survives by bartending in Manhattan’s high-end cocktail lounges. Stunned by loss and regret, he is sleepwalking through a hung-over life when he discovers Violet’s book about when they were young, hopeful servers at a Times Square restaurant. As he searches the words of his self-destructive soul-mate, can he reconcile his past and find the hope he lost along the way?

On the eve of the Occupy Wall Street protests, C is flat broke. Once a renowned textile artist, she’s now the sole proprietor of an arts supply store in Lower Manhattan. Divorced, alone, at loose ends, C is stuck with a struggling business, a stack of bills, a new erotic interest in her oldest girlfriend, and a persistent hallucination in the form of a rogue garden gnome with a pointed interest in systems collapse. Replaying recent history through a distorting glass, The Visitors charts the last days of a broken status quo as the path is cleared for something new.

It’s the late 1980s, and Matthew Carnap is awake most nights, afflicted by a potent combination of insomnia and undiagnosed ADHD. Sometimes he gazes out his bedroom window into the dark; sometimes he wanders the streets of his small Southern Minnesota town. But more often than not, he crosses the hall into his stepfather Russ’ roller rink to spend the sleepless hours lost in music. Russ’s record collection is as eclectic as it is extensive, and he and Matthew bond over discovering new tunes and spinning perfect skate mixes. Then Matthew’s mother divorces Russ.

She wondered what kind of world she had brought her two daughters into, the tedious cycle of rural Jamaican life. No chance for them to set off upon adventures and see the outside world. But sisters Jenny and Hortense Rodney, do get to see the outside world. Growing up in rural Claremont, working amid the hustle and bustle, lawn parties and houses of joy in Trenchtown, the two sisters take a chance and move to England with their husbands, that far-off land of riches, where they settle down to motherhood among the jazz cafés and bleak streets of Brixton.

Inspired by true events, All Sorrows Can Be Borne is the story of Noriko Ito, a Japanese woman faced with unimaginable circumstances that force her to give up her son to save her husband. Set in Hiroshima, Osaka, and the badlands of eastern Montana and spanning the start of World War II to 1982, this breathtaking novel is told primarily in the voice of Noriko, a feisty aspiring actress who fails her audition to enter the Takarazuka Theater Academy.

Justine feels uneasy in her marriage, her theatre career and her relationship with her estranged mother, a famous painter. An intuitive and uncanny mimic, distinguished by a pronounced scar across her forehead (the result of a childhood accident), Justine has made acting the centre of her life since she was a teenager, but lately her outwardly charmed life in Toronto has begun to ring false. After a disastrous audition in London, England, a chance encounter with a stranger leads to an unorthodox business proposition that would allow Justine to abandon the world she knows indefinitely.

Vetman lives in a cottage outside a sleepy English village, where nobody realises that he's saving animals in incredible, bionic ways - except the animals themselves, of course! But trouble is brewing...because Vetman's old foe, The Man with No Name, has set up camp nearby and plans to poison dogs and cats across the land. Imogen and Findlay stumble across an injured hedgehog and take him to Vetman's door, they have no idea that they are about to embark on an important mission to save more than just their spiky new friend.

In the first line of Ocean State, we learn that a high school student was murdered, and we find out who did it. The story that unfolds from there with incredible momentum is thus one of the buildup to and fallout from the murder, told through the alternating perspectives of the four women at its heart. The murderer Angel, her mother Carol, and the victim Birdy, all come alive on the page as they converge in a climax both tragic and inevitable. Watching over it all is the retrospective testimony of Angel’s younger sister, Marie.

Luttie McFee's history has taught her to avoid attachments...to people, to places, and to almost everything. With her mother long dead and her father long gone to find his fortune in Las Vegas, 15-year-old Luttie lives in the god-forsaken town of Yankton, South Dakota, with her nine-year-old brother, Fate, and Floy Satterfield, the 300-pound ex-girlfriend of her father.

A daughter and mother: two women miles, years, and dreams apart. One defies traditions and expectations. The other conforms to them, even in a new land. Their emotional distance grows while the daughter, now a wife and mother herself, comes to better understand the woman she’s become and why, as she ruminates on inherited trauma, the need to forgive, and the lengths she’ll go to free herself from the past.

Stuck in the lethal Outer Rings of Glacium, I must fight to survive. And not just that; my true identity must remain the gravest of secrets. No one can find out I'm the Tatuma of Osolis - the princess of their enemy world - especially now I know why I've been veiled my entire life. I have to believe I can do it, because only then can I continue the search for Prince Kedrick's murderer and navigate my way back to King Jovan's castle.

Cameron Spark's life is falling apart. He is separated from his wife and has moved in with his widowed dad. Then he receives a letter. It is from Christie. Twenty-five years earlier, the shy Cameron attended university where he made three unlikely friends: Christie, the rich Canadian; Tommo, the wannabe rock star; and Bex, the feminist activist.

It is the summer of 1964. In Mississippi, tensions are mounting over civil-rights demonstrations occurring ever more frequently - and violently - across the state. But in Paige Dunn's small house, there are more immediate concerns. Challenged by the effects of the polio she contracted during her last month of pregnancy, Paige is determined to live as normal a life as possible and to raise her daughter, Diana, with the support of her tough-talking black caregiver, Peacie.

From the number-one New York Times best-selling author of The Right Words at the Right Time comes a one-of-a-kind collection of inspiring stories about ordinary women who have reinvented themselves in extraordinary ways. "You can be anything you want to be." "Reach for the moon." "It's never too late to make a change." We've heard it all. But anyone who has ever tried to make a big life change knows that it can be a bit more complicated - and scary - than that. How do you get up the nerve (and confidence) to actually take the leap?

In this infectious rhyming book, Baby Llama turns bedtime into an all-out llama drama! Tucked into bed by his mama, Baby Llama immediately starts worrying when she goes downstairs, and his soft whimpers turn to hollers when she doesn't come right back. But just in time, Mama returns to set things right. Children will relate to Baby Llama's need for comfort, as much as parents will appreciate Mama Llama's reassuring message.

"Dos años antes de irse de casa, mi padre le dijo a mi madre que yo era muy fea." Así empieza esta novela extraordinaria sobre el descubrimiento de la mentira, el amor y el sexo, narrada por la inolvidable voz de Giovanna, una joven empeñada en conocer a su tía Vittoria, incomprensiblemente borrada de las conversaciones y álbumes de fotografías. Con ello desencadenará sin saberlo el desmoronamiento de su familia intelectual y burguesa, perfecta solo en apariencia.

Like all families, the Parkers of Thunder Bay have had their share of complications. But when matriarch Kate Parker miraculously survives plummeting over a waterfall in a barrel—a feat captured on a video that goes viral—it's Kate's family who tumbles into chaos under the spotlight.

For Jackie Pierce, everything changed the summer of 1979, when she spent three months of infinite freedom at her bohemian uncle's sprawling estate on the California coast. As musicians, artists, and free spirits gathered at The Sandcastle for the season in pursuit of inspiration and communal living, Jackie and her cousin Willa fell into a fast friendship, testing their limits along the rocky beach and in the wild woods... until the summer abruptly ended in tragedy, and Willa silently slipped away into the night.

When Deenie finds out that she has scoliosis, she’s scared. When she sees the brace for the first time, she wants to scream. But the words won’t come out. And Deenie, beautiful Deenie, who everyone says should be a model, is stuck wearing a brace from her neck to her hips. For four years—or longer. She never worried about how she looked before—how will she ever face the hard times ahead?

The stories collected in Call and Response are strongly anchored in place—in the village of Serowe, where the author is from, and in Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana—charting the emotional journeys of women seeking love and opportunity beyond the barriers of custom and circumstance. Gothataone Moeng is part of a new generation of writers coming out of Africa whose voices are ready to explode onto the literary scene. She offers us insight into communities, experiences and landscapes through stories that are cinematic in their sweep,