World Family

I Am Liu Yuejin, by prize-winning Chinese novelist Liu Zhenyun, is a novel of Beijing that paints a microcosm of contemporary China, dealing with classes at the two extremes: the super rich and the migrant workers who make them rich through deceit and corruption. The protagonist, Liu Yuejin, is a work site cook and small-time thief whose bag is stolen. While searching for it, he stumbles upon another bag, which contains a flash disk that chronicles high-level corruption, and sets off a convoluted chase.

For a brief period after the world changed forever, the self-reliant community of Trout Run Valley managed to avoid conflict. They practiced subsistence, and found safety and security within their numbers. As the post-apocalyptic timeline moved forward, it began to spiral downward. Takers had made their presence known, and their malevolent intentions clear, transforming the once benign community into a violent battleground.

Mercy lives in modern-day Pietermaritzburg, South Africa with her eccentric foster aunts - two elderly sisters so poor, they can only afford one lightbulb. A nasty housing developer is eying their house. And that same house suddenly starts falling apart - just as Aunt Flora starts falling apart. She's forgetting words, names, and even how to behave in public. Mercy tries to keep her head down at school so nobody notices her. But when a classmate frames her for stealing the school's raffle money, Mercy's teachers decide to take a closer look at her home life.

Talk of impending war is a steady drumbeat throughout North Carolina, though Joetta McBride pays it little heed. She and her husband, Ennis, have built a modest but happy life for themselves, raising two sons, fifteen-year-old Henry, and eleven-year-old Robert, on their small subsistence farm. They do not support the Confederacy's position on slavery, but Joetta considers her family to be neutral, believing this is simply not their fight. Her opinion is not favored by many in their community, including Joetta's own father-in-law, Rudean.

On the edge of 27, Jazzy hatches a plan for her and her best girlfriends, Sher, Imo, and Fann. Before the year is out, these Sarong Party Girls will all have spectacular weddings to rich ang moh - Western expat - husbands, with Chanel babies (the cutest status symbols of all) quickly to follow. Razor-sharp, spunky, and vulgarly brand-obsessed, Jazzy is a determined woman who doesn't lose.

The wise and insightful "If the Buddha" books have won Charlotte Kasl thousands of devoted fans. In her latest work, she turns her attention to parenthood, a stage of life that leaves most of us searching for answers. If the Buddha Had Kids applies Kasl's signature blend of spiritual guidelines, exercises, and practical advice to help parents raise peacemakers in our increasingly turbulent times, emphasizing that finding peace within a family is the first step toward creating a peaceful world.

Drawing on her lifelong journey to know her family's history, leading Christian activist Lisa Sharon Harper recovers the beauty of her heritage, exposes the brokenness that race has wrought in America, and casts a vision for collective repair.

The year is 2013 and the Greenspans are the envy of Brookline, Massachusetts, an idyllic (and idealistic) suburb west of Boston. Scott Greenspan is a successful physician with his own cardiology practice. His wife, Deb, is a pillar of the community who spends her free time helping resettle refugees. Their daughter, Maya, works at a distinguished New York publishing house and their son, Gideon, is preparing to follow in his father’s footsteps. They are an exceptional family from an exceptional place, living in exceptional times.

In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces the extraordinary lives of young Japanese brides, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers....

Here is a landmark book that reveals the way boys think and that shows parents, educators, and coaches how to reach out and help boys overcome their most common yet difficult challenges - by the best-selling author who changed our conception of adolescent girls. What you'll find in Masterminds and Wingmen is critically important for every parent - or anyone who cares about boys - to know. Collaborating with a large team of middle- and high-school-age editors, Rosalind Wiseman has created an unprecedented guide to the life your boy is actually experiencing - his on-the-ground reality.

As fall paints the Pennsylvania countryside in flaming colors, Sylvia Bergstrom Compson is contemplating the future of her beloved Elm Creek Quilts. The Elm Creek Quilt Camp remains the most popular quilter’s retreat in the country, but unexpected financial difficulties have beset them and the Bergstrom family’s stately nineteenth-century manor. Now in her eighth decade, Sylvia is determined to maintain her family’s legacy, but she needs new resources—financial and emotional.

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of An Italian Girl in Brooklyn comes a captivating new novel of enduring love and devastating secrets, sweeping across England during WWII to Australia five decades later, based on a true story. Rupert promised he was going to come back. All Florence had to do was wait.

Most of us are terrified of conflict, says Arnold Mindell, PhD, author of 15 books and internationally recognized for his innovative synthesis of Jungian therapy, dreams, and bodywork. But we needn't be. His burning passion is to create groups and organizations, where everyone looks forward to group processes instead of fearing them. He calls this the deep democracy of open forums, where all voices, thoughts, and feelings are aired freely, especially the ones nobody wants to hear.

"My life is dust and rocks and rude boys and skinny babies, and long days of searching for my mother when I don’t have the faintest idea where she might be". Parvana is alone. Her father is dead. A refugee in a land full of dangers, she must travel across Afghanistan to find her mother and sisters. As she travels, Parvana finds friends - a starving, orphaned baby; a strange, hostile boy; a solitary girl who darts in and out of the minefields to find food. Perhaps, with their help, she may one day be reunited with her family...

Struggling with your toddler's sudden emotional storms? Walking on eggshells around preschooler tantrums? You're not alone. Managing a child's anger can be overwhelming, but help is here. "Anger Management for Kids" is your guide to navigating these challenges with practical, easy-to-follow strategies tailored for children aged 3-5.

When Huong arrives in New Orleans with her two young sons, she is jobless, homeless, and worried about her husband, Cong, who remains in Vietnam. As she and her boys begin to settle in to life in America, she continues to send letters and tapes back to Cong, hopeful that they will be reunited and her children will grow up with a father. But with time, Huong realizes she will never see her husband again. While she attempts to come to terms with this loss, her sons grow up in their absent father's shadow, haunted by a man and a country trapped in their memories and imaginations.

Heading off for a weekend in Las Vegas with her friends, Jessie Ralle has only one worry: how to make it through the road trip in the same car as her ex, Jimmy Kelter. The guy she hasn’t come close to getting over since he broke up with her five months ago. The guy who’s finally ready to tell her why he did it, because now he wants her back. Only, sometimes knowing why doesn’t actually make things better. Sometimes it leads to bigger, more terrifying questions.

L.A. is parched, dry as a bone, and all Oscar, the weather-obsessed patriarch of the Alvarado family, desperately wants is a little rain. He’s harboring a costly secret that distracts him from everything else. His wife, Keila, desperate for a life with a little more intimacy and a little less Weather Channel, feels she has no choice but to end their marriage. Their three daughters - Claudia, a television chef with a hard-hearted attitude.

The year is 1994, and South Africa is in political turmoil as its first democratic election looms. Against a backdrop of apartheid and racial violence, traumatized artist Yolanda Petersen returns from the Appalachian foothills to the land of her youth at the behest of her mother. While there Yolanda longs to reconnect with her estranged daughter, Ingrid, the product of an illegal mixed-race affair with a white man. But Ingrid is missing, and as Yolanda quickly discovers, she isn’t the only woman in Cape Town desperate to protect her own.

No one wakes up and decides, “I’m planning to ruin my marriage, neglect my kids, and cause mistrust in my family.” Yet our personal pursuits and busyness can lead us there. In this book, marriage and leadership coaches Dr. Josh and Christi Straub show how seven core decisions can help us put what’s most important center stage in our lives. Famous at Home is Josh and Christi’s realistic, grace-filled look at the struggles families face in a culture that competes for their time, attention, and identity.