List

"The perfect pick to really light a fire under my book club, and yours....A reminder that goodness, and books, can still win in this world." --New York Times Book Review

"A beautiful, big-hearted treasure of a novel." --Lily King

National Bestseller * From the award-winning author of The One-in-a-Million Boy comes a heartfelt, character-driven, and uplifting novel about a chance encounter at a bookstore, exploring redemption, unlikely friendships, and the life-changing power of sharing stories.

Our Reasons meet us in the morning and whisper to us at night. Mine is an innocent, unsuspecting, eternally sixty-one-year-old woman named Lorraine Daigle...

In this emotional book club fiction, Violet Powell, a twenty-two-year-old from Abbott Falls, Maine, is being released from prison after serving twenty-two months for a drunk-driving crash that killed a local kindergarten teacher.

Harriet Larson, a retired English teacher who runs the prison book club, is facing the unsettling prospect of an empty nest.

Frank Daigle, a retired machinist, hasn't yet come to grips with the complications of his marriage to the woman Violet killed.

When the three encounter each other one morning in a bookstore in Portland--Violet to buy the novel she was reading in the prison book club before her release, Harriet to choose the next title for the women who remain, and Frank to dispatch his duties as the store handyman--their lives begin to intersect in transformative ways.

How to Read a Book is an unsparingly honest and profoundly hopeful story about forgiveness, letting go of guilt, seizing second chances, and the power of books to change our lives. With the heart, wit, grace, and depth of understanding that has characterized her work, Monica Wood illuminates the decisions that define a life and the kindnesses that make life worth living.

"A deeply humane and touching novel; highly recommended for book clubs and fans of Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures." -- Booklist

A National Bestseller

One family. Four generations. A secret son. A devastating addiction. A Texas family is met with losses and surprises of inheritance, but they’re unable to shake the pull back toward each other in this family saga perfect for readers of Mary Beth Keane and Claire Lombardo.

Ryan and Lillian Bright are deeply in love, recently married, and now parents to a baby girl, Georgette. But Lillian has a son she hasn’t told Ryan about, and Ryan has an alcohol addiction he hasn’t told Lillian about, so Georgette comes of age watching their marriage rise and fall.

When a shocking blow scatters their fragile trio, Georgette tries to distance herself from reminders of her parents. Years later, Lillian’s son comes searching for his birth family, so Georgette must return to her roots, unearth her family’s history, and decide whether she can open up to love for them—or herself—while there’s still time.

Told from three intimate points of view, The Bright Years is a tender, true-to-life debut that explores the impact of each generation in a family torn apart by tragedy but, over time, restored by the power of grace and love.

Over 1 Million Copies Sold

A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK | A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall is an unforgettable story of love, loss, and the choices that shape our lives…but it’s also a masterfully crafted mystery that will keep you guessing until the very last page. Seriously, that ending?! I did not see it coming.” —Reese Witherspoon

“Stirring and mysterious…fires directly at the human heart and hits the mark.” —Delia Owens, New York Times bestselling author of Where the Crawdads Sing

A love triangle unearths dangerous, deadly secrets from the past in this thrilling tale perfect for fans of The Paper Palace and Where the Crawdads Sing.

“The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.”

Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager—the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.

As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel’s life, tensions around the village rise and dangerous secrets and jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences. Beth is forced to make a choice between the woman she once was, and the woman she has become.

A sweeping love story with the pace and twists of a thriller, Broken Country is a novel of simmering passion, impossible choices, and explosive consequences that toggles between the past and present to explore the far-reaching legacy of first love.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures?

"Mesmerizing"—Brit Bennett • "A page turner.”—Ha Jin • “Gorgeous, heartfelt, soaring, philosophical and deft"—Andrew Sean Greer • "Traverses time with verve and feeling."—Raven Leilani

Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.

In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.

Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND READ WITH JENNA PICK—A WORD-OF-MOUTH HIT THAT BEGS TO BE SHARED

LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL

“Dazzling.” —The Washington Post

“A magnificent novel.” —Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Horse

The extraordinary novel that asks: Can a name change the course of a life?

In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son's birth. Her husband, Gordon, respected in the community but a controlling presence at home, intends for her to follow a long-standing family tradition and name the baby after him. But when faced with the decision, Cora hesitates...

Spanning thirty-five years, what follows are three alternate and alternating versions of their lives, shaped by Cora’s last-minute choice of name. In richly layered prose, The Names explores the painful ripple effects of domestic abuse, the messy ties of family, and the possibilities of autonomy and healing.

Through a prism of what-ifs, Florence Knapp invites us to consider the "one . . . precious life" we are given. Full of hope, this is the story of three names, three versions of a life, and the infinite possibilities that a single decision can spark. It is the story of one family and love’s endless capacity to endure, no matter what fate has in store. 

The book’s brilliantly imaginative structure, propulsive storytelling, and emotional power are certain to make The Names a modern classic.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • GMA BOOK CLUB PICK • AN NPR BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the New York Times bestselling author of I Was Anastasia and Code Name Hélène comes a gripping historical mystery inspired by the life and diary of Martha Ballard, a renowned 18th-century midwife who defied the legal system and wrote herself into American history.

"Fans of Outlander’s Claire Fraser will enjoy Lawhon’s Martha, who is brave and outspoken when it comes to protecting the innocent. . . impressive."—The Washington Post

"Once again, Lawhon works storytelling magic with a real-life heroine." —People Magazine

Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Months earlier, Martha documented the details of an alleged rape committed by two of the town’s most respected gentlemen—one of whom has now been found dead in the ice. But when a local physician undermines her conclusion, declaring the death to be an accident, Martha is forced to investigate the shocking murder on her own.

Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves, and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.

Clever, layered, and subversive, Ariel Lawhon’s newest offering introduces an unsung heroine who refused to accept anything less than justice at a time when women were considered best seen and not heard. The Frozen River is a thrilling, tense, and tender story about a remarkable woman who left an unparalleled legacy yet remains nearly forgotten to this day.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER and BOOK CLUB FAVORITE * Over 1 million copies sold worldwide!

"A global sensation."--Associated Press

* 2024 High Plains Book Award Winner * 2023 Reading the West Book Award Winner * Finalist for Goodreads Choice Award * Colorado Public Radio 2023 Books We Love * 2025 Prix de l'Union Interalliée *

Set amid Colorado's wild beauty, the heartbreaking coming-of-age story of a resilient young woman whose life is changed forever by one chance encounter. A tragic and uplifting novel of love and loss, family and survival--and hope--for readers of Great Circle, The Four Winds, and Where the Crawdads Sing.

"Beautiful . . . A striking first novel of love and strength and growth, set against the forests and rivers of Colorado's high country. Read is a gifted writer, and the book is a literary triumph."--Denver Post

"With gorgeous descriptions of the great outdoors, an illicit love story, and an unforgettable protagonist, Go as a River offers something for everyone."--Real Simple

"I couldn't stop thinking about it . . . it's stunning."--Jen Hatmaker

Seventeen-year-old Victoria Nash runs the household on her family's peach farm in the small ranch town of Iola, Colorado--the sole surviving female in a family of troubled men. Wilson Moon is a young drifter with a mysterious past, displaced from his tribal land and determined to live as he chooses.

Victoria encounters Wil by chance on a street corner, a meeting that profoundly alters both of their young lives, igniting as much passion as danger. When tragedy strikes, Victoria leaves the only life she has ever known, fleeing into the surrounding mountains, where she struggles to survive in the wilderness with no clear notion of what her future will bring. As the seasons change, she also charts the changes in herself, finding in the beautiful but harsh landscape the meaning and strength to move forward and rebuild all that she has lost, even as the Gunnison River threatens to submerge her homeland--its ranches, farms, and the beloved peach orchard that has been in her family for generations.

Inspired by true events surrounding the destruction of the town of Iola in the 1960s, Go as a River is a story of deeply held love in the face of hardship and loss, but also of finding courage, resilience, friendship, and, finally, home--where least expected. This stunning debut explores what it means to lead your life as if it were a river--gathering and flowing, finding a way forward even when a river is dammed.

A charming, witty and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Winner
Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a mystery that will haunt the survivors, unravel a family, and remain unsolved for nearly fifty years

"A stunning debut about love, race, brutality, and the balm of forgiveness." —People, A Best New Book

July 1962. Following in the tradition of Indigenous workers from Nova Scotia, a Mi’kmaq family arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

“An unforgettable exploration of grief, love, and kin,” (The Boston Globe), this show stopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.

An emotional, rousing novel inspired by the incredible true story of two giraffes who made headlines and won the hearts of Depression-era America.

"Few true friends have I known and two were giraffes..."

Woodrow Wilson Nickel, age 105, feels his life ebbing away. But when he learns giraffes are going extinct, he finds himself recalling the unforgettable experience he cannot take to his grave.

It's 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California's first giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. Behind the wheel is the young Dust Bowl rowdy Woodrow. Inspired by true events, the tale weaves real-life figures with fictional ones, including the world's first female zoo director, a crusty old man with a past, a young female photographer with a secret, and assorted reprobates as spotty as the giraffes.

Part adventure, part historical saga, and part coming-of-age love story, West with Giraffes explores what it means to be changed by the grace of animals, the kindness of strangers, the passing of time, and a story told before it's too late.

With the epic sweep of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and the lyrical beauty of Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan, The Mountains Sing tells an enveloping, multigenerational tale of the Trần family, set against the backdrop of the Việt Nam War. Trần Diệu Lan, who was born in 1920, was forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the Land Reform as the Communist government rose in the North. Years later in Hà Nội, her young granddaughter, Hương, comes of age as her parents and uncles head off down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail to fight in a conflict that tore apart not just her beloved country, but also her family.

Vivid, gripping, and steeped in the language and traditions of Việt Nam, The Mountains Sing brings to life the human costs of this conflict from the point of view of the Vietnamese people themselves, while showing us the true power of kindness and hope.

Thomas McNulty, aged barely seventeen and having fled the Great Famine in Ireland, signs up for the U.S. Army in the 1850s. With his brother in arms, John Cole, Thomas goes on to fight in the Indian Wars--against the Sioux and the Yurok--and, ultimately, the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, the men find these days to be vivid and alive, despite the horrors they see and are complicit in.

Moving from the plains of Wyoming to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry's latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. An intensely poignant story of two men and the makeshift family they create with a young Sioux girl, Winona, Days Without End is a fresh and haunting portrait of the most fateful years in American history and is a novel never to be forgotten.

At forty, Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, is overworked and isolated. He spends his days immersed in the struggles of immigrants only to return to an empty apartment and occasional hook-ups with a man who wants more than Peter can give. But when the asylum case of a young gay man pierces Peter's numbness, the event that he has avoided for twenty years returns to haunt him.

Ann, his mother, who runs a women's retreat center she founded after leaving his father, is hurt by the estrangement from Peter but cherishes the world she has built. She long ago put behind her the decision that divided her from her son. But as Peter's case plunges him further into the fraught memory of his first love and the night of violence that changed his life, he and his mother must confront the secret that tore them apart.

With the publication of her first novel, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearns for escape from small town life. When Singer's mute companion goes insane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (and loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music. Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated -- and, through Mick Kelly, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he’s searching for lost love.

Years later a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited--- her only connection to her family’s troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world.

The addictive novel about four young friends navigating the cutthroat world of classical music and their complex relationships with each other, as ambition, passion, and love intertwine over the course of their lives.



Jana. Brit. Daniel. Henry. They would never have been friends if they hadn't needed each other. They would never have found each other except for the art which drew them together. They would never have become family without their love for the music, for each other.



Brit is the second violinist, a beautiful and quiet orphan; on the viola is Henry, a prodigy who's always had it easy; the cellist is Daniel, the oldest and an angry skeptic who sleeps around; and on first violin is Jana, their flinty, resilient leader. Together, they are the Van Ness Quartet. After the group's youthful, rocky start, they experience devastating failure and wild success, heartbreak and marriage, triumph and loss, betrayal and enduring loyalty. They are always tied to each other - by career, by the intensity of their art, by the secrets they carry, by choosing each other over and over again.



Following these four unforgettable characters, Aja Gabel's debut novel gives a riveting look into the high-stakes, cutthroat world of musicians, and of lives made in concert. The story of Brit and Henry and Daniel and Jana, The Ensemble is a heart-skipping portrait of ambition, friendship, and the tenderness of youth.

In this joyful new book, Roopa Gulati travels through India and celebrates the wonderfully varied food that makes up a nation, making pitstops at the homes of the people who cook it every day. You'll be taken to a remote kitchen in Gujarat, with shelves stacked high with pickle jars, where the air is heady with the scent of homegrown curry leaves and the nutty aroma of rotlas imbued with woody smoke from the open fire; to the old French Quarter of Pondicherry, where lunch is served on a banana leaf picked fresh from the garden; and to Delhi for a family reunion, a feast culminating in mouth-watering desserts, and a cooking lesson. Roopa's writing, full of warmth and joy, brings these people and places to life, and her recipes bring them to our kitchens. 

From dals to masalas, and quick and easy suppers to feasts for a crowd, the easy- to-follow recipes are bursting with authentic flavors using ingredients found in your local supermarket. Recipes include eggplant pakoras with onion and tamarind relish, potato and paneer tikki, corn bhajis, Tandoori sea bass, home- style Punjabi chicken curry, Kashmiri lamb with saffron, cardamom and red chiles, cumin potatoes, Bengali-style butternut squash with tamarind and jaggery, channa dal with spinach, black-eyed peas in garlic tomato masala, phirni with honey, orange, and saffron syrup, and pistachio and cardamom cookies. 

From the monsoon-washed backwaters of Kerala to the crowded markets of Mumbai, this celebration of regional cooking will bring the sights, sounds and flavors of India to your table.

Dive into the colorful world of plant-based dyeing! Are you interested in dyeing fabric with plant-based dyes but don't know where to start? Are you a beginner, or would you like to improve your skills and learn more about plant dyeing and printing techniques? This book offers you a complete approach: from picking plants to dyeing fabrics, from mordanting to creating patterns. Besides creating the dyes, learn shibori techniques, how to make flower and leaf prints, tips for dying yarn, and more. You'll also find step-by-step instructions for 12 unique projects including giving new life to a stained shirt, dying cloth napkins, botanical wall hangings, dyed macrame plant hangers, and more. Camille Binet-Dezert's takes an eco-responsible approach, repurposing old fabrics, reusing vegetable peels, and utilizing nature's gifts to their fullest. Color charts show more than 20 common plants that will give you a beautiful range of dyes.

From its humble beginnings as a discount shop on Seventh Avenue, Barneys grew into an international phenomenon, setting the tone for fashion not only in New York, but across the country and worldwide. Told with razor-sharp wit and inimitable style, They All Came to Barneys takes us on an insider’s journey as rakish, would-be rocker Gene Pressman and the global fashion industry grew up and came into their own, side by side.

Through back-room handshake deals with designers, days at the haberdasheries on Savile Row and nights out at New York clubs and Paris bistros, three generations of Pressmans—grandfather Barney, son Fred, and grandson Gene—built Barney’s little shop into an empire and a byword for cool around the world. They All Came to Barneys is a front-row seat to the rise of some of the biggest names in fashion (Armani, Alaïa, Wintour, Meisel) and the store that came to dress an entire generation of celebrities, models, artists, and magnates. Set against the biggest movements in fashion and in culture, from the birth of ready-to-wear in the ’60s and disco delirium in the ’70s to the devastation of AIDS in the ’80s and the explosion of globalization in the ’90s, Gene Pressman had a backstage pass to history—until hubris, ambition, and risky business threatened to tear it all apart. . .

Vanilla is one of the most expensive of flavorings--so valuable that it was smuggled or stolen by pirates in the early days--and yet it is everywhere. It is a key ingredient in dishes ranging from crème brûlée to Japanese purin. It is the quintessential ice cream flavor in the United States. Eric T. Jennings explains how the world's only edible orchid, originally endemic to Central America, became embedded in the international culinary and cultural landscape.

In tracing vanilla's rise, Jennings describes how in the 1840s an enslaved boy named Edmond Albius discovered a way to pollinate vanilla orchids with a toothpick or needle--an ingenious process that is still in use. This method transformed the vanilla sector by enabling the plant to be grown outside of its natural range. Jennings also looks at how the vanilla craze led to the search for now‑pervasive substitutes, and how a vanilla lobby has fought back. He further unravels how vanilla--the world's most expensive crop and once considered its most refined fragrance--came to mean "bland."

This tale of botany, production techniques, consumption habits, and colonial rivalry connects the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, revealing how vanilla has become a potent symbol of the modern global village.

If you've watched Project Runway or Making the Cut and wondered how the competitors instinctively know how to create such a diverse array of garments - it's because they learned the art of pattern making. Ultimate Guide to Designing Patterns for Clothing is an illustrative master class in the art of garment pattern making for aspiring fashion designers, fashion design students, and sewing and fabric enthusiasts. Lifelong designer and patternmaker Suzy Furrer has distilled her 35+ years of fashion pattern experience into this definitive resource for expert pattern making instruction. The book includes 11 chapters, each meticulously explaining a fundamental element of the pattern making process. Each element is fully explored with diagrams and illustrations making it ideal for visual learners. Furrer begins with an introduction to pattern making - explaining what is required for building a proper patternmaking tool kit and terminology used throughout the book before guiding the budding pattern maker through the 11 instructional chapters.

Thousands of writers--from first-time authors to #1 New York Times best-selling authors--have learned from Lisa Mangum's masterful literary advice and inspiration. Now she's collected the best of her writing and editing tips in this helpful book that covers the entire writing and querying process, from nurturing a story idea all the way to submitting a polished manuscript.

In the first half of the book, Lisa guides readers through the various steps of the writing process, including starting the story in the right place, developing characters with high-stake goals, mapping character relationships for increased conflict, and introducing tension and plot twists. She also shares tips and tricks for nailing a satisfying ending as well as helping authors discover their own unique voice that can help them break through writer's block.

With her decades of experience, Lisa then takes writers on a behind-the-scenes tour of the many levels of editing, including a handy flowchart that unravels the mystery of where the commas go in a sentence.

Finally, she helps writers prepare to "get published" by deconstructing what makes a query letter catch an editor's eye and how to answer the all-important question: "What's your book about?"

Packed with Lisa's own personal stories of encouragement and inspiration, Write Fearless. Edit Smart. Get Published. is a literary adventure that's as fun as it is informative.

This comprehensive guide to the flags of the world provides concise, accurate coverage of every country in the world, giving the history, meaning, and symbolism of national flags, together with large-scale and smaller locator maps. The Complete Guide to Flags of the World, 4th Edition includes the history of flags, the color flags in over 220 countries and territories, flags of international organizations, large-scale and detailed locator maps for easy reference, up-to-date data and statistics for all countries, information about the history and symbolism of each flag, a section on de facto and emerging states, and a full index. This 4th edition comes with 38 updated flags and new, revised information for all things flags.

Discover how easy and enjoyable allergy-friendly cooking can be with Deliciously Nourishing Eats. Aleyda Batarse—a busy mom of three—transformed her health through food. After battling ankylosing spondylitis, a degenerative form of arthritis, Aleyda discovered that embracing wholesome ingredients alleviated her symptoms. She adopted a diet largely free of gluten, dairy, and refined sugar, and cooking in a completely new way, which inspired her popular blog, The Dish on Healthy. 

This cookbook effortlessly translates Aleyda’s sought-after recipes into a practical kitchen companion, with options that accommodate gluten, dairy, nut, soy, and egg allergies. Inside, you’ll find over 100 dishes for every time of the day—breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and snacktime—that will cater to your family’s needs

In the early 1960s, a peaceful world was an imaginable goal. The still-young United Nations was widely respected and regarded as humankind's best hope for resolving global conflicts. African and Asian nations, having recently won their freedom from colonial domination, sought dignity and influence on the world stage. At the helm of their international efforts was U Thant, a practicing Buddhist from a remote town in Burma who, as the UN's first non-Western secretary-general, became the Cold War era's preeminent ambassador of peace.

From the moment of his predecessor's mysterious death in 1961, Thant faced a deluge of violent conflicts in Congo, Yemen, Cyprus, and Nigeria, as well as one between India and Pakistan, that threatened larger conflagrations.

Crucially, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he played an indispensable role--virtually hidden until now--in defusing tensions and helping both superpowers find a way back from nuclear confrontation. For years Thant also challenged Washington over its war in Vietnam, identifying paths to peace that could have saved the lives of millions.

Drawing on newly declassified documents, Thant's grandson, historian Thant Myint-U, gives a riveting account of how his grandfather's gentle yet willful disposition shaped his determination to avoid a third world war, give voice to the newly decolonized world, create a fairer international economy, and safeguard the environment. Rather than a vestige of an idealistic past, U Thant's fight for peace is central to a fresh understanding of our world today.

Didn't think the New Complete Guide to Band Saws could get more complete? Welcome to the Revised Edition, compiling over 250 illustrations and 3D diagrams to steer you through a comprehensive list of band saw uses. Author Mark Dugsinke, a lifelong woodworker from Merrill, Wisconsin, has spent a lifetime innovating in the world of band saws: his patented woodworking devices are a testament to that. That's why you'll want to review this exhaustive resource: it features chapters on band saw basics, saw shopping, choosing the blade to suit your needs, sawing straight and curved cuts, and more. You'll see lessons for creating jigs and fixtures like an expert. But most of all, you'll know you're in the trusted hands of an expert who knows every detail of what it takes to create the best band saw creations possible. Add it all together and this Revised Edition becomes an essential companion to any band saw enthusiast's shelf.

Tired of thinking about what's for dinner? Discover 127 recipes that are as simple as they are delicious! From the New York Times bestselling author of the Fix-It-and-Forget-It series comes this new collection of quick, family-friendly recipes for your slow cooker or Instant Pot. Eating well has never been so easy!

Explore the rich cultural heritage of Japanese embroidery with this beautifully crafted book, which offers a stunning collection of 200 cross stitch patterns, capturing the timeless elegance and intricate artistry of Japanese design. Reasons you'll love this book: A wide array of patterns inspired by the graceful beauty of kimonos, the delicate charm of floral arrangements, and the profound simplicity of traditional Japanese design. Meticulously charted with clear colour guides, making them accessible to both beginners and experienced stitchers. Embrace the mindfulness and calming nature of repetitive stitching as you immerse yourself in a meditative practice while creating beautiful art. Super flexible and creative - many of the patterns are designed as repeat patterns, enabling you to extend them to cover any size of fabric and create incredible projects. With simple techniques and detailed instruc tions, this book makes the art of cross-stitching accessible to everyone. Plus along the way you'll learn how to alter and develop the patterns using simple techniques such as switching the colours, flipping or rotating the motifs and more, making 200 patterns become almost infinite in creative possiblities. Whether you're looking to adorn your home with unique decor or create heartfelt handmade gifts, this essential directory of authentic Japanese cross stitch patterns provides endless inspiration.

Step into the ancient art of relief carving with a priceless selection of the latest trends and projects! All-Time Favorite Relief Carving Projects. With projects that run the gamut from classic to trendy, All-Time Favorite Relief Carving Projects will teach you how to master relief wood carving with a minimal learning curve. Want to build your own fairy door, ornaments, whimsical bank, Halloween candy holder, or wall hanging? They're all here. Or indulge your creative side with Celtic knots, nature scenes, angels, animals, or green men. Even better, it's appropriate for woodcarvers of any skill level. Hone your skills by practicing fundamental patterns. Or, if you're already a relief carving regular, go straight to the advanced projects and try your hand at household fixtures that will wow your guests.

In the spring of 2018, Tom Piazza climbed into a 1977 Coupe de Ville with the great singer-songwriter John Prine to write an article for the Oxford American. Their Florida road trip ignited a deep friendship, full of tall tales over epic meals, long nights playing guitar and trading songs, and visits back and forth between their homes in Nashville and New Orleans. Along the way, Prine invited Piazza to work with him on a memoir, with John telling sprawling, often hilarious stories of his youth and family in Chicago and Kentucky, his breakthrough into the national spotlight, his riotous early years in the Nashville country scene, and much more. When Prine died suddenly of COVID in April 2020, that unfinished memoir evolved into an intimate and very personal narrative of the artist's final years. In it, Piazza offers fans an unforgettable portrait of the beloved musician in his late glory--as a boyish cut-up, an epic raconteur, a great American poet, and, most important, a beloved friend.

Part scientific detective story, part personal odyssey, The Last Extinction is the definitive account of a radical theory that has reshaped how we understand our planet’s past and, as we face the possibility of a sixth extinction, how we might survive its future.

For decades, the dominant theory held that an asteroid impact caused the dinosaurs’ extinction. But Princeton Geologist Dr. Gerta Keller followed the evidence to the truth: Deccan volcanism, a series of massive volcanic eruptions in India, triggered a long-term climate catastrophe and Earth’s fifth mass extinction. Her findings upended the field and ignited a bitter feud in modern science—what became known as the “Dinosaur Wars.”

Raised in poverty on a Swiss farm and told she could never be a scientist, Keller defied expectations, earning her PhD at Stanford and battling her way into the highest ranks of Geology, eventually becoming a Professor of Paleontology and Geology at Princeton University. Her refusal to back down in the face of ridicule, sabotage, and sexism makes her story as thrilling as her science, which offers urgent insight into today’s climate crisis: Sustained planetary upheaval—not a single cataclysmic event—can plunge the planet into an age of death.

Questions linger about Theo, a pleasant but mysterious stranger, after his arrival in the southern city of Golden.

Who is he, and why is he here?

He arrives early one spring and by chance - or is it? - he visits a coffee shop where 92 framed pencil portraits are on display. Inspired, Theo sets out on a mission of purchasing all the portraits one at a time and quietly bestowing them on their 'rightful owners.'

Stories are told; friendships are born; and lives are changed.

Theo of Golden is a beautifully crafted story about the power of creative generosity, the importance of wonder to a purposeful life, and the far-reaching possibilities of anonymous kindness.

Three former Chosen Ones have joined together to spend their retirement in peace and quiet, running Second Life Books and Gifts in Salem, MA. A calm, peaceful, tourist-filled oasis, where they never have to worry about saving the world. Until some of the locals start summoning ancient creatures best left where they were . . . and they discover that their bookstore basement just may be the portal to the underworld. These ex-heroes may have thought they were done . . . but if they want to finish their retirement in peace, they’ll have to join together to save the world one last time.

Why leave saving the world to the young? Cozy mystery readers looking for an extra dash of magic will eat this story up: fun, funny, and heartwarming, it's a novel about community, second chances, and the healing power of scones.

Peace is an illusion . . .After a decade, acclaimed Hugo Award winner and science fiction master John Scalzi returns to the Old Man's War series with the long-awaited seventh book, The Shattering Peace.For a decade, peace has reigned in interstellar space. An agreement between the Colonial Union, Earth and the alien Conclave has kept the forces of war at bay. But there is a new force that threatens the hard-maintained peace: The Consu. The most advanced intelligent species humans have ever met are on the cusp of a species-defining civil war, and the rest of the galaxy is at risk of being dragged into the conflict.Gretchen Trujillo is a mid-level diplomat, working in an unimportant part of the Colonial Union bureaucracy. But when she is called to take part in a secret mission involving representatives from every powerful faction in space, what she finds there has the chance to redefine the destinies of each - or destroy them forever . . .

Prudence Welch has found solace in her introverted life in Baysville, a charming tourist town in Northern Ontario. Despite once dreaming of a life beyond its borders, she now finds contentment in her routines: working at her father’s gas station, writing poetry, and caring for her mother, who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease shortly after Prue’s nineteenth birthday. But as her mother’s condition worsens and her father’s concerns about her own future intensify, Prue feels her world slipping further out of control.

Enter Milo Kablukov, an enigmatic wanderer whose beat-up van covered with ill-advised bumper stickers rolls into town just when Prue needs a change. It’s all too easy to let go with him, and Prue can’t help but strike up an unlikely friendship with Milo, which leads to a wild and sexy agreement between them.

Milo, a man of many adventures and countless stories, is not one to settle down. However, his brother’s urgent need for help has brought him to Baysville, and now the intriguing Prue has given him more reason to stay—especially once they start spending more time together, their chemistry intensifying, and casual-sex lessons begin at Prue’s request.

But as their temporary arrangement blossoms into something deeper, Prue and Milo discover that getting out of their comfort zones is one thing . . . taking that leap together is something else entirely.

Casey Pearson grew up with a doomsday-prepping father. At eighteen, tired of living an unconventional life, she left home, vowing never to return.

More than a decade later, a mysterious viral outbreak changes everything, including the people it infects, turning them into zombielike creatures. It's the end of the world, and no one saw it coming--well, except for Casey's father. With no place left to run and danger lurking around every corner, Casey is forced to return home.

Upon arrival, she's surprised to find that her dad has hunkered down with a group of survivors, including her archnemesis, Blake Morrison, the high school bully who made Casey's teenage years a living hell.

While struggling to live on the compound, face outside threats, and survive alongside her handsome enemy, Casey will learn that although the world has ended, hers is just beginning.

“Old spies grow ridiculous, River. Old spies aren’t much better than clowns.” Or so David Cartwright, the late retired head of MI5, used to tell his grandson. He forgot to add that old spies can be dangerous, too, especially if they’ve fallen on hard times—as River Cartwright is about to learn the hard way.

David Cartwright, long buried, has left his library to the Spooks’ College in Oxford, and now one of the books is missing. Or perhaps it never existed. River, once a “slow horse” of Slough House, MI5’s outpost for demoted and disgraced spies, has some time to kill while awaiting medical clearance to return to work, and starts investigating the secrets of his grandfather’s library.

Over at the Park, MI5 First Desk Diana Taverner is in a pickle. An operation carried out during the height of the Troubles laid bare the ugly side of state security, and those involved are threatening to expose details. But every threat hides an opportunity, and Taverner has come up with a scheme. All she needs is the right dupe to get caught holding the bag.

Jackson Lamb, the enigmatic and odiferous head of Slough House, has no plans to send in the clowns. On the other hand, if the clowns ignore his instructions, any harm that befalls them is hardly his fault. But they’re his clowns. And if they don’t all make it home, there’ll be a reckoning.

In this haunting psychological horror, Willow’s life has become a fever dream, her days lost in a twisted loop where time no longer flows as it should. Is she held captive by her husband Liam’s iron rules—or by the insidious darkness of her own mind?

Her only connection to the world beyond her walls is a young girl named Sarah, whose unexpected visits to Willow’s garden spark a glimmer of hope. But as cracks form in her carefully controlled existence, horrifying truths seep through, twisting the familiar into something sinister. The floral wallpaper peels back to reveal haunting messages carved into the walls, and the house itself pulses with malevolent life.

When Sarah suddenly vanishes, Willow is forced to confront the dark shadows of her past and the horrors lurking within her fractured psyche. The question remains: is Willow truly a prisoner of her home, or of her own mind?

Some doors, once opened, can never be closed. And some truths are better left buried in the garden.

Thirty years ago, John Lo was acquitted of the murder of an employee he was having an affair with. The repercussions of that long-ago event still haunt his adult children. Brennan, a lawyer following in her father’s footsteps in more ways than one, has always maintained that the trial got it right. Hunter, a disgruntled war correspondent whose similarities to his father run more than skin-deep, believes their father got away with murder. Their opposing convictions have pushed them apart. Now, spurred by their mother’s failing health, the estranged siblings decide to reconcile their differences by reinvestigating the murder to come to a definitive conclusion.

Told in a dual timeline that moves between John’s perspective thirty years prior and Brennan and Hunter’s present-day investigation, Hollow Spaces is a moving portrait of a flawed man’s shocking fall from grace and a gripping exploration of race in corporate America, filial loyalty, ambition, and the fallout of a sensational trial for those caught in its wake.

By the end of 1943, nearly all of Europe’s Jewish population had fled, been deported, captured, or killed by Hitler. Only Hungary, and its almost 900,000 Jews, remained free from Hitler’s subjugation. They lived under government edicts and restrictions but without fear of harm. That changed in March 1944, after the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad, as an avaricious Hitler conquered Hungary and declared his plan for mass extermination of the Jewish people. With the notorious Adolf Eichmann supervising the process, Nazis began rounding up Hungary’s Jewish population. 

In this dramatic new novel, The Righteous, Theresa Weissbach, a professor at the University of Michigan, hasn’t heard from her parents in Budapest for over a year. Her best friend, Julia Powers, recently awarded a Distinguished Service Medal for her OSS service in occupied Holland, joins with her to locate and rescue Theresa’s family. While there, they become involved in a much larger cause, trying to save as many people as they can. Theresa’s father, a leader of the Budapest Jewish community, accompanies them in a desperate effort to rescue their people. Working alongside the newly formed US War Refugee Board, diplomats from neutral nations, and leaders of underground rescue organizations, Julia and Theresa forge relationships with Swiss Vice Consul Carl Lutz and Swedish businessman, Raoul Wallenberg. Their skills and connections in the complex networks of public and secret diplomacy enable Julia, Theresa, and others to take enormous risks in an effort to save thousands of innocent lives.

Authentic, suspenseful, and deeply moving, The Righteous continues Ronald H. Balson’s fictional exploration of World War II and the heroic actions of those who resisted Hitler’s Master Plan.

Martha's Daughter is the brilliant and influential author David Haynes's first short story collection and the first time that Haynes's stories have ever been assembled in one volume. Steeped in everyday gossip and lives, this collection ranges from the magically real life of a city's crumbling superhero to a rundown motel whose long-term guests are lucky to call home. In the titular novella the first hours are chronicled after Cynthia finds out her mother has died. What we learn is that Cynthia is a woman who has been bullied by her mother's overbearing opinions, her disdain for difference, her respectability politics, and her outdated beliefs about how men and women should relate to one another. Martha's death is less a catalyst for Cynthia's grief than an opportunity to free herself of a burden too long endured.

When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.

Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India. She fears that she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.

Louisa Walsh emerged from a tumultuous childhood with a degree in counseling, a wealthy boyfriend, and her sunny outlook on life mostly intact. But that optimism is tested when she’s dumped and left unable to afford rent on their gorgeous house in the mountains of Colorado. Even with her life in disarray, Lou knows losing the one stable place she’s ever called home is not an option.

Her plan: ask her reclusive landlord, Henry Rhodes, to let her stay for free in exchange for renting out the house’s many rooms as a bed-and-breakfast. She’s shocked when he agrees to her terms, and even more surprised to discover Henry is a handsome thirtysomething veterinarian with silver at his temples and sadness in his eyes. One who does not take it well when Lou starts marketing her B and B as a retreat for the recently heartbroken.

But as the Comeback Inn opens its doors to its weary, hopeful guests, Lou and Henry find themselves dancing around both their undeniable connection and the closely held secrets that threaten to topple this fragile new start. A chance at love, here, could be too close to home…or it could be exactly where their hearts finally heal.

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves the Thursday Murder Club. 

When a local developer is found dead with a mysterious photograph left next to the body, the Thursday Murder Club suddenly find themselves in the middle of their first live case. 

As the bodies begin to pile up, can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer, before it's too late?

What is the purpose of a map? 

Nell Young’s whole life and greatest passion is cartography. Her father, Dr. Daniel Young, is a legend in the field and Nell’s personal hero. But she hasn’t seen or spoken to him ever since he cruelly fired her and destroyed her reputation after an argument over an old, cheap gas station highway map.

But when Dr. Young is found dead in his office at the New York Public Library, with the very same seemingly worthless map hidden in his desk, Nell can’t resist investigating. To her surprise, she soon discovers that the map is incredibly valuable and exceedingly rare. In fact, she may now have the only copy left in existence...because a mysterious collector has been hunting down and destroying every last one—along with anyone who gets in the way.

But why?

To answer that question, Nell embarks on a dangerous journey to reveal a dark family secret and discovers the true power that lies in maps...

In the fictional Chinese city of Yong’an, an amateur cryptozoologist is commissioned to uncover the stories of its fabled beasts. These creatures live alongside humans in near-inconspicuousness—save their greenish skin, serrated earlobes, and strange birthmarks. 
Aided by her elusive former professor and his enigmatic assistant, our narrator sets off to document each beast, and is slowly drawn deeper into a mystery that threatens her very sense of self.  
  
Part detective story, part metaphysical enquiry, Strange Beasts of China engages existential questions of identity, humanity, love and morality with whimsy and stylistic verve.

Dublin, 1904. Nora Joseph Barnacle is a twenty-year-old from Galway working as a maid at Finn's Hotel. She enjoys the liveliness of her adopted city and on June 16—Bloomsday—her life is changed when she meets Dubliner James Joyce, a fateful encounter that turns into a lifelong love. Despite his hesitation to marry, Nora follows Joyce in pursuit of a life beyond Ireland, and they surround themselves with a buoyant group of friends that grows to include Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim, and Sylvia Beach.

But as their life unfolds, Nora finds herself in conflict between their intense desire for each other and the constant anxiety of living in poverty throughout Europe. She desperately wants literary success for Jim, believing in his singular gift and knowing that he thrives on being the toast of the town, and it eventually provides her with a security long lacking in her life and his work. So even when Jim writes, drinks, and gambles his way to literary acclaim, Nora provides unflinching support and inspiration, but at a cost to her own happiness and that of their children.

With gorgeous and emotionally resonant prose, Nora is a heartfelt portrayal of love, ambition, and the quiet power of an ordinary woman who was, in fact, extraordinary.

Will Sedgwick can’t believe that after months of searching for his oldest friend, Martin Easterbrook is found hiding in an attic like a gothic nightmare. Intent on nursing Martin back to health, Will kindly kidnaps him and takes him to the countryside to recover, well away from the world.

Martin doesn’t much care where he is or even how he got there. He’s much more concerned that the man he’s loved his entire life is currently waiting on him hand and foot, feeding him soup and making him tea. Martin knows he’s a lost cause, one he doesn’t want Will to waste his life on.

As a lifetime of love transforms into a tender passion both men always desired but neither expected, can they envision a life free from the restrictions of the past, a life with each other?

Jamie Watson has always been intrigued by Charlotte Holmes; after all, their great-great-great-grandfathers are one of the most infamous pairs in history. But the Holmes family has always been odd, and Charlotte is no exception. She’s inherited Sherlock’s volatility and some of his vices—and when Jamie and Charlotte end up at the same Connecticut boarding school, Charlotte makes it clear she’s not looking for friends.

But when a student they both have a history with dies under suspicious circumstances, ripped straight from the most terrifying of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Jamie can no longer afford to keep his distance. Danger is mounting and nowhere is safe—and the only people they can trust are each other.

When the invitation to attend the press opening of a luxury Swiss hotel—owned by reclusive billionaire Marcus Leidmann—arrives, it’s like the answer to a prayer. Three years after the birth of her youngest child, Lo Blacklock is ready to reestablish her journalism career, but post-pandemic travel journalism is a very different landscape from the one she left ten years ago.

The chateau on the shores of Lake Geneva is everything Lo’s ever dreamed of, and she hopes she can snag an interview with Marcus. Unfortunately, he proves to be even more difficult to pin down than his reputation suggests. When Lo gets a late-night call asking her to come to Marcus’s hotel room, she agrees despite her own misgivings. She’s greeted, however, by a woman claiming to be Marcus’s mistress, and in life-or-death jeopardy.

What follows is a thrilling pursuit across Europe, forcing Lo to ask herself just how much she’s willing to sacrifice to save this woman…and if she can even trust her?

Travel magazine writer Lo Blacklock has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: one week on a luxury cruise with only a handful of cabins. The sky is clear, the waters calm, and the elite guests jovial as the exclusive cruise ship, the Aurora, begins her voyage in the picturesque North Sea.

At first, Lo’s voyage is perfect, with a plush cabin, elegant dinner parties, and plenty of relaxation. But as the week wears on, frigid winds whip the deck, gray skies fall, and Lo witnesses what she can only describe as a dark and terrifying nightmare: a woman being thrown overboard. The problem? All passengers remain accounted for—and so, the ship sails on as if nothing has happened, despite Lo’s desperate attempts to convey that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong…

In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.
 
Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,” asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal?  
 
In contrast, the bombing of Tokyo on the deadliest night of the war was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost thousands of civilian lives, but may have spared even more by averting a planned US invasion. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell asks, “Was it worth it?”
 
Things might have gone differently had LeMay’s predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, remained in charge. Hansell believed in precision bombing, but when he and Curtis LeMay squared off for a leadership handover in the jungles of Guam, LeMay emerged victorious, leading to the darkest night of World War II. The Bomber Mafia is a riveting tale of persistence, innovation, and the incalculable wages of war.

From master storyteller Stephen King, his unforgettable and terrifying sequel to The Shining—an instant #1 New York Times bestseller that is “[a] vivid frightscape” (The New York Times)—also a major motion picture starring Ewan McGregor!

Years ago, the haunting of the Overlook Hotel nearly broke young Dan Torrance’s sanity, as his paranormal gift known as “the shining” opened a door straight into hell. And even though Dan is all grown up, the ghosts of the Overlook—and his father’s legacy of alcoholism and violence—kept him drifting aimlessly for most of his life. Now, Dan has finally found some order in the chaos by working in a local hospice, earning the nickname “Doctor Sleep” by secretly using his special abilities to comfort the dying and prepare them for the afterlife. But when he unexpectedly meets twelve-year-old Abra Stone—who possesses an even more powerful manifestation of the shining—the two find their lives in sudden jeopardy at the hands of the ageless and murderous nomadic tribe known as the True Knot, reigniting Dan’s own demons and summoning him to battle for this young girl’s soul and survival...

Isolated by Mexico's deadly Copper Canyons, the blissful Tarahumara Indians have honed the ability to run hundreds of miles without rest or injury. In a riveting narrative, award-winning journalist and often-injured runner Christopher McDougall sets out to discover their secrets. In the process, he takes his readers from science labs at Harvard to the sun-baked valleys and freezing peaks across North America, where ever-growing numbers of ultra-runners are pushing their bodies to the limit, and, finally, to a climactic race in the Copper Canyons that pits America’s best ultra-runners against the tribe. McDougall’s incredible story will not only engage your mind but inspire your body when you realize that you, indeed all of us, were born to run.

John, an impoverished Scottish minister, has accepted a job evicting the lone remaining occupant of an island north of Scotland—Ivar, who has been living alone for decades, with only the animals and the sea for company. Though his wife, Mary, has serious misgivings about the errand, he decides to go anyway, setting in motion a chain of events that neither he nor Mary could have predicted.

Shortly after John reaches the island, he falls down a cliff and is found, unconscious and badly injured, by Ivar who takes him home and tends to his wounds. “Clear chronicles the surprising bond that develops between these two men…pack[ing] a great deal of power into a compact tale” (The Wall Street Journal) about connection, home, and hope—in which John begins to learn Ivar’s language, and Ivar sees himself reflected through the eyes of another person for the first time in decades.

Unfolding during the final stages of the infamous Scottish Clearances—a period of the 19th century which saw whole communities of the rural poor driven off the land in a relentless program of forced evictions—this singular novel explores what binds us together in the face of insurmountable difference, the way history shapes our deepest convictions, and how the human spirit can endure despite all odds. 

Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of a bereaved and pursued musician embarking under sail on a sentient Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. Rainy, an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs and remote islands of the inland sea. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbled infrastructure and a lawless society. Amidst the Gulliver-like challenges of life at sea and no safe landings, Rainy is lifted by physical beauty, surprising humor, generous strangers, and an unexpected companion in a young girl who comes aboard. And as his innate guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy’s private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his strengthening wake.

Bridey Kelly has come to Greenway House—the beloved holiday home of Agatha Christie—in disgrace. A terrible mistake at St. Prisca's Hospital in London has led to her dismissal as a nurse trainee, and her only chance for redemption is a position in the countryside caring for children evacuated to safety from the Blitz.

Greenway is a beautiful home full of riddles: wondrous curios not to be touched, restrictions on rooms not to be entered, and a generous library, filled with books about murder. The biggest mystery might be the other nurse, Gigi, who is like no one Bridey has ever met. Chasing ten young children through the winding paths of the estate grounds might have soothed Bridey's anxieties and grief—if Greenway were not situated so near the English Channel and the rising aggressions of the war.

When a body washes ashore near the estate, Bridey is horrified to realize this is not a victim of war, but of a brutal killing. As the local villagers look among themselves, Bridey and Gigi discover they each harbor dangerous secrets about what has led them to Greenway. With a mystery writer's home as their unsettling backdrop, the young women must unravel the truth before their safe haven becomes a place of death . . .

On holiday on the Cornish Riviera, Hercule Poirot is alarmed to hear pretty Nick Buckley describe her recent “accidental brushes with death.” First, on a treacherous Cornish hillside, the brakes on her car failed. Then, on a coastal path, a falling boulder missed her by inches. Later, an oil painting fell and almost crushed her in bed.

So when Poirot finds a bullet hole in Nick’s sun hat, he decides that this girl needs his help. Can he find the would-be killer before he hits his target?

Is living the life you’ve wished for really a dream come true?

Lucy Young is twenty-six and tired. Tired of fetching coffees for senior TV producers, sick of going on disastrous dates, and done with living in a damp flat with roommates who never buy toilet paper. After another disappointing date, Lucy stumbles upon a wishing machine. Pushing a coin into the slot, Lucy closes her eyes and wishes with all her might: Please, let me skip to the good part of my life.

When she wakes the next morning to a handsome man, a ring on her finger, a high-powered job, and two storybook-perfect children, Lucy can’t believe this is real—especially when she looks in the mirror, and staring back is her own fortysomething face. Has she really skipped ahead like she’s always wanted, or has she simply forgotten a huge chunk of her life? As Lucy begins to embrace new relationships and the perks of maturity, she’ll have to ask herself: Can she go back to her previous life, and if so, can she stand to leave the good part behind?

As far as Jolene is concerned, her interactions with her colleagues should start and end with her official duties as an admin for Supershops, Inc. Unfortunately, her irritating, incompetent coworkers don’t seem to understand the importance of boundaries. Her secret to survival? She vents her grievances in petty email postscripts, then changes the text color to white so no one can see. That is until one of her secret messages is exposed. Her punishment: sensitivity training (led by the suspiciously friendly HR guy, Cliff) and rigorous email restrictions.

When an IT mix-up grants her access to her entire department’s private emails and DMs, Jolene knows she should report it, but who could resist reading what their coworkers are really saying? And when she discovers layoffs are coming, she realizes this might just be the key to saving her job. The plan is simple: gain her boss’s favor, convince HR she’s Supershops material, and beat out the competition.

But as Jolene is drawn further into her coworkers' private worlds and realizes they are each keeping secrets, her carefully constructed walls begin to crumble—especially around Cliff, who she definitely cannot have feelings for. Eventually she will need to decide if she’s ready to leave the comfort of her cubicle, even if that means coming clean to her colleagues.

A bossy child who lives under a white cloth near a tree; a schoolgirl who keeps doll's brains in a desk drawer; an old man with two shadows, one docile and one rebellious; a diplomat no one has ever seen who goes fishing at an artificial lake no one has ever heard of. These are some of the inhabitants of People from My Neighborhood.

In their lives, details of the local and everyday—the lunch menu at a tiny drinking place called the Love, the color and shape of the roof of the tax office—slip into accounts of duels, prophetic dreams, revolutions, and visitations from ghosts and gods. In twenty-six "palm of the hand" stories—fictions small enough to fit in the palm of one's hand and brief enough to allow for dipping in and out—Hiromi Kawakami creates a universe ruled by mystery and transformation.

The Emperor needs necromancers.

The Ninth Necromancer needs a swordswoman.

Gideon has a sword, some dirty magazines, and no more time for undead nonsense.

Brought up by unfriendly, ossifying nuns, ancient retainers, and countless skeletons, Gideon is ready to abandon a life of servitude and an afterlife as a reanimated corpse. She packs up her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and prepares to launch her daring escape. But her childhood nemesis won’t set her free without a service.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House and bone witch extraordinaire, has been summoned into action. The Emperor has invited the heirs to each of his loyal Houses to a deadly trial of wits and skill. If Harrowhark succeeds she will be become an immortal, all-powerful servant of the Resurrection, but no necromancer can ascend without their cavalier. Without Gideon’s sword, Harrow will fail, and the Ninth House will die.

Of course, some things are better left dead.

Before she thinks of herself as Little Alien, our protagonist is a lonely girl who doesn't understand the world the way other children seem to. So when a late-night TV special introduces her to the mysterious Voynich Manuscript--an ancient tome written in an indecipherable language--Little Alien experiences something she hasn't before: hope. Could there be others like her, who also feel like they're from another planet?
Convinced the Voynich Manuscript holds the answers she needs, Little Alien and her best (and only) friend Bobby decide they must find this strange book. Where that decision leads them will change everything.
Narrated by an unexpected guide who has arrived to give Little Alien the advice she'll need to find her way, Life Hacks for a Little Alien is both a coming-of-age adventure and a love letter to language. Alice Franklin will have you swinging from stitches to tears on the uneven path to finding a life that fits, even when you yourself do not.

When renowned anonymous author J. R. Alastor hires former aspiring writer Mila del Angél to host a writing retreat at his private manor off the coast of Maine, she jumps at the chance—particularly since she has an axe to grind with one of the invitees. The guest list? Six thriller authors, all masters of deceit, misdirection, and mayhem.
Confess the crimes, survive the tropes.
Alastor and Mila have masterminded a week of games, trope-fueled riddles, and maybe a jump scare or two—the perfect cover for Mila to plot a murder of her own. But when a guest turns up dead—and it’s not the murder she planned—Mila finds herself trapped in a different narrative altogether.
One by one, you’ll lose your turn.
With a storm isolating the island, and the body count rising, Mila must outwit a killer who knows literally every trick in the book.
Until only one of us remains . . .

On a bright spring afternoon, Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything. Grabbing an armful of clothes off the clothesline, she straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away. Head spinning, all she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe--and that this time, when she leaves, she must stay away.
On the surface, she has a perfect life: her husband, Ryan, is a good provider, sometimes even kind and attentive, from a nice Irish family, and they have another baby on the way. But he also monitors Ciara's every move, flies into unpredictable rages where he convinces her she can do nothing right, and has isolated her from work, friends, and her beloved family.
Was fleeing the right thing to do? With no job and no support, Ciara struggles to provide a sense of normalcy for her little girls. Facing a broken housing system, they move into a hotel room on a floor reserved for women like her, eating takeout, washing their clothes in the bathroom sink, and building a community with the other residents. Ryan, meanwhile, wages a relentless campaign to win her back, and Ciara wavers. He never hit her, after all, and don't the girls need a stable home? 

Northern England, 2010. After a tragic accident upends her life, Kate Mercer leaves London to work at an old guest house near the Scottish border, where she hopes to find a fresh start and heal from her loss. When she arrives, she begins to unravel the truth about her past, but discovers that the mysterious elderly proprietor is harboring secrets of her own.
Berlin, 1938. Audrey James is weeks away from graduating from a prestigious music school in Berlin, where she’s been living with her best friend, Ilse Kaplan. As war looms, Ilse’s family disappears and high-ranking Nazi officers confiscate the house. In desperation, Audrey becomes their housekeeper while Ilse is forced into hiding in the attic. When a shocking turn of events embroils Audrey in the anti-Hitler movement, she must decide what matters most: protecting those she loves, or sacrificing everything for the greater good.
Inspired by true stories of courageous women and the German resistance during World War II, The Secret History of Audrey James is a captivating novel about the unbreakable bonds of friendship, the sacrifices we make for those we love, and the healing that comes from human connection.

A peculiar pet shop in Tokyo has been known to offer customers the unique opportunity to take home one of seven special cats, whose "magic" is never promised, but always received. But there are rules: these cats must be returned after three days. They must eat only the food supplied by the owner, and they must travel to their new homes with a distinctive blanket. 
In The Blanket Cats, we meet seven customers, each of whom is hoping a temporary feline companion will help them escape a certain reality, including a couple struggling with infertility, a middle-aged woman on the run from the police, and two families in very different circumstances simply seeking joy. 
But like all their kind, the "blanket cats" are mysterious creatures with unknowable agendas, who delight in confounding expectations. And perhaps what their hosts are looking for isn't really what they need. Three days may not be enough to change a life. But it might just change how you see it.

Tilda Finch is a successful businesswoman, a mother to two wonderful adult daughters, and besides an unexpected divorce, she’s living a relatively happy life. Until she wakes up one morning and her finger seems to have disappeared. She thinks back to the kombucha she drank the night before—perhaps it was spiked? Studying herself in the mirror, she discovers one of her ears has also disappeared! She rushes to the doctor, who after a multitude of tests says she’s sorry to inform her that she has invisibility, a disorder that affects millions of women worldwide, mostly after the age of forty—she is disappearing, and there is no cure.
Tilda isn’t overly surprised. She’s felt invisible for years. But after attending a support group for women like her and seeing how resigned they are to simply fading away, she thinks there must be a better way. Hesitant, she seeks out a controversial therapist who compels her to realize that she can’t expect the world to see her if she can’t first see herself. And the new man she meets, who she thinks is blind to her faults, might just see her more clearly than anyone has ever before. Because if we can get the voices in our heads to stop being so critical and be more compassionate, we might realize how wonderful we truly are.

Together in strength. When the Great Wind devastated Japan, Korea, and China, survivors found refuge on what they came to know as Ronin Island. Now, too young to have known any other world, Kenichi, son of a samurai, and Hana, daughter of farmers, must work together to stop a mutant plague that’s consuming the mainland and quickly advancing on their home! In this serpentine ride through the 19th century where not all is what it seems, follow Kenichi, Hana, their friends, and their foes from Ronin Island to the mainland and back again as they search for a way to protect all that they know from the forces of the mutated byōnin and shogunate alike.

In the final months of World War II, a clandestine group known as The Choir successfully smuggles thousands of escapees out of Nazi-occupied Rome via a secret route known as the Escape Line. When an unidentified airman falls wounded from the sky, The Choir is plunged into danger and the survival of the Escape Line itself is threatened.

The Escape Line's collapse would leave thousands stranded. Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, its architect and the acknowledged leader of The Choir, broods inside the Vatican, paralyzed by the perils of keeping his Roman underground railroad functioning. Meanwhile, SS Commander Paul Hauptmann has been tasked with destroying the entire operation, and the price of failure is high--his wife and children are under Gestapo lock-and-key in Berlin. Into this deliriously thrilling melee steps Contessa Giovanna Landini, a reckless, audacious, and magnetic member of the Italian Resistance who has the nerve to challenge Hauptmann's authority.

Beautifully written and expertly crafted, The Ghosts of Rome is a historical suspense novel bursting with action, atmosphere, and unforgettable characters by one of contemporary fiction's most acclaimed and beloved writers.

In a place and time unknown, two elderly sisters live in a walled garden, secluded from the outside world. Evelyn and Lily have only ever known each other. What was before the garden, they have forgotten; what lies beyond it, they do not know. Each day is spent in languid service to their home: tending the bees, planting the crops, and dutifully following the instructions of the almanac written by their mother.
When a nameless boy is found hiding in the boarded house at the center of their isolated grounds, their once-solitary lives are irrevocably disrupted. Who is he? Where did he come from? And most importantly, what does he want?
As suspicions gather and allegiances falter, Evelyn and Lily are forced to confront the dark truths about themselves, the garden, and the world as they’ve known it.

A year after her child is born, Jane suffers a series of strange episodes: amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations, and an inexplicable sense of dread. Three days after her first visit to a psychiatrist, Jane suddenly goes missing. A day later she is found unconscious in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in the midst of what seems to be an episode of dissociative fugue; when she comes to, she has no memory of what has happened to her.
Are Jane’s strange experiences the result of being overwhelmed by motherhood, or are they manifestations of a long-buried trauma from her past? Why is she having visions of a young man who died twenty years ago and who warns her of a disaster ahead? Jane’s symptoms lead her psychiatrist ever deeper into the farthest reaches of her mind and cause him to question everything he thinks he knows about so-called reality—including events in his own life.
Karen Thompson Walker’s profound and beautifully written novel is both a speculative mystery about memory, identity, and fate and a mesmerizing literary puzzle about the bonds of love—between mother and child, between a man and a woman, and among those we’ve lost but who may still be among us.

On Stenland, there comes a time known as skeld season: one day, any woman on the island can wake with three black lines on her forehead, the mark of a skeld. Skeld season comes around without warning, and while each window of time lasts only three months, anyone a skeld turns to stone is very much dead.
That's how Tess's mother killed Soren's parents. Maybe for this reason alone, Tess and Soren should not have fallen in love. Since the time her mother was a skeld, Tess has wanted to leave Stenland, to run from the windswept island, from her family and friends. She is unwilling to bear the responsibility of one day killing anyone, let alone someone she loves. Soren has been determined to stay, to live out his life in the place he knows as home, even if that life could be cut short during the latest skeld season. They cannot see eye to eye--and yet they cannot stay apart. She tries to come back for him. He tries to leave for her. But can your love for one person outweigh everything else combined? And how do you decide how much you're willing to risk, if it might mean destroying someone else in the process?

Cecily Foster loves to make podcasts. She fiercely protects her colleagues, dearly adores her friends, and never misses dinner with her sister. But after a disastrous relationship with a colleague who stole her heart and her ideas, she’s put romantic love on hold.
When the boss who’s disappointed her again and again finally offers her the chance to host her own show, she wants to be thrilled. But there’s a catch—actually, two catches. First, the show will be about Cecily’s dating life. And second, she has to follow the guidance of influencer and newly minted relationship coach Eliza Cassidy, whose relentlessly upbeat attitude seems ready-made for social media, not real life.
Cecily would rather do anything other than put her singledom on display (ugh) or take advice from the internet (UGH). But when her boss hints that doing the show is the only way to protect a friend’s job, she realizes she has no choice.
To make matters more complicated, once she’s committed to twenty blind dates of Eliza’s choosing, Cecily finds herself unable to stop thinking about Will, a photographer she helped to rescue a very big and very lovable lost dog. Even though there are sparks between the two, Will’s own path is uncertain, and Eliza’s skeptical comments about Cecily’s decision-making aren’t helping. On the one hand, Will seems great. But on the other hand . . . don’t they all?
As Cecily struggles to balance the life she truly desires and the one Eliza wants to create for her, she finds herself at a crossroads. Can Cecily sort through all the advice and find a way to do what she loves without losing herself in the process?

Maya and Natasha are twin sisters born in the midst of the Siege of Leningrad in 1941 and immediately abandoned by their mother, a prima ballerina at the Kirov Ballet who would rather die than not dance. Taken in by their mother's best friend at the Kirov, the girls are raised to be dancers themselves. The Vaganova Ballet Academy--and the totalitarian Soviet regime--is the only world they know.

In 1958, now seniors at the Vaganova at the height of the Cold War, all Maya and Natasha and their classmates want is to dance with the Kirov, and to join the company on its tour to America next year. But a new law from the Kremlin upends Maya and Natasha's lives: due to fears of defection, family members may no longer travel abroad together. The Kirov can only accept one of them.

Maya, long accustomed to living in her sister's shadow, accepts her bitter fate, until a new dance partner inspires her to dream bigger and practice harder. For the first time--and at the cruelest possible moment--the sisters are equally matched. And then one sister betrays the other, altering their lives forever and splitting them in two, though neither will stray far from the other's orbit.

As one of the twins pursues her ballet career and experiences a world outside Russia for the first time, the other is cast in an epic film adaptation of War and Peace, produced and financed by the Soviet State. As the Cold War heats up, Maya and Natasha must confront their loyalties: to East versus West; to the government that saved them versus their dreams of freedom; and, always, to each other.

PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, Pushcart Prize winner, and Best American Stories contributor, Eric Puchner returns with an ambitious and deeply moving novel set against the backdrop of the American West that follows three lifelong friends and the betrayal at the center of their entwined fates. Cece and Charlie are in love and a few weeks away from their summer wedding. But when Cece meets Charlie's best friend from college, Garrett, her long-held expectations for her future begin to crumble. As Garrett's gruff mask slips, Cece begins to anticipate the big day with dread as her feelings for Garrett become impossible to bury. And as she decides to follow her instincts, ditching her groom for his best man, she will alter the three of their lives forever, the events of that July reverberating through marriage, parenthood, and, in the end, across generations. Years later, Cece's daughter, Lana, and Charlie's son, Jasper, meet and become fast friends, finding themselves reunited again and again throughout their adolescence. Soon enough, they find themselves enacting their parents' mistakes, falling victim to duplicity and heartbreak, with age and mortality looming. With Montana's once-warm summers growing untenably hot, and the nearby lake all but drying up, obscured only by the ceaseless smoke of wildfires, Garrett's career as a wildlife researcher feels increasingly futile. As he watches Cece begin to lose herself, Charlie wonders whether he will ever find stability, especially with a son failing to adjust to the demands of adulthood. With delicacy, precision, and enormous heart, Dream State is at once a study of the unholy catastrophe of marriage, and a tender ode to the beauty of impermanence.

Max didn’t believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he is still here, he watches his girlfriend, Hannah, lost in grief in the apartment they shared and begins to realize how much of her life was invisible to him.
In the weeks and months before Max’s death, Hannah was haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seemed to offer the potential of a fresh new chapter, but the past refused to stay hidden. It found expression in the untold stories of the people she grew up with, and the events that broke her family apart and led her to Max.
Both a celebration and an autopsy of a relationship, and spanning multiple generations, The Echoes is a novel about love and grief, motherhood and sisterhood, secrets and who has the right to reveal them—what of our past can be cast away and what is fixed forever, echoing down through the years.

Hana Babic is a quiet, middle-aged librarian in Minnesota who wants nothing more than to be left alone. But when a detective arrives with the news that her best friend has been murdered, Hana knows that something evil has come for her, a dark remnant of the past she and her friend had shared.

Thirty years before, Hana was someone else: Nura Divjak, a teenager growing up in the mountains of war-torn Bosnia--until Serbian soldiers arrived to slaughter her entire family before her eyes. The events of that day thrust Nura into the war, leading her to join a band of militia fighters, where she became not only a fierce warrior but a legend--the deadly Night Mora. But a shattering final act forced Nura to flee to the United States with a bounty on her head.

Now, someone is hunting Hana, and her friend has paid the price, leaving her eight-year-old grandson in Hana's care. To protect the child without revealing her secret, Hana must again become the Night Mora--and hope she can find the killer before the past comes for them, too. 
 

Long before Oliver Twist stumbled onto the scene, Jacob Fagin was scratching out a life for himself in the dark alleys of nineteenth-century London. Born in the Jewish enclave of Stepney shortly after his father was executed as a thief, Jacob's whole world is his open-minded mother, Leah. But Jacob's prospects are forever altered when a light-fingered pickpocket takes Jacob under his wing and teaches him a trade that pays far better than the neighborhood boys could possibly dream.
Striking out on his own, Jacob familiarizes himself with London's highest value neighborhoods while forging his own path in the shadows. But everything changes when he adopts an aspiring teenage thief named Bill Sikes, whose mercurial temper poses a danger to himself and anyone foolish enough to cross him. Along the way, Jacob's found family expands to include his closest friend, Nancy, and his greatest protégé, the Artful Dodger. But as Bill's ambition soars and a major robbery goes awry, Jacob is forced to decide what he really stands for--and what a life is worth.

New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city of New Orleans.
Though the historical archive is silent about the eighteen months Juárez spent in New Orleans, Yuri Herrera imagines how Juárez’s time there prepared him for what was to come. With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.

In 1989 moviegoers were amazed at the new vision of the Dark Knight brought to the screen by filmmaker Tim Burton, starring Michael Keaton as Batman and Jack Nicholson as The Joker. Now, in the tradition of DC's very successful Batman '66 series, Batman '89 is set in a truly gothic Gotham City and features colorful villains including The Joker, Two-Face, and many more.

There's something wrong in Renfield County.

It's in the water, the soil, the wood. But worst of all, it's in the minds of the residents, slowly driving them mad. When Lawrence Renfield massacred his family and drew The Giant in his farmhouse with their blood, no one imagined the repercussions. At the very least, the bloodstained wood should have been set aflame, not chopped down and repurposed as furniture, décor, and heirlooms across the county. But that's exactly what happened. Now regular people--like you and me--are sitting on... eating with... admiring... the cursed wood and reaping the consequences.

These are their stories.

Bryan Ford, the acclaimed author of New World Sourdough and judge on Netflix's Blue Ribbon Baking Championship, is changing how the world bakes with recipes that are "full of deep expertise" yet "unusually warm [and] friendly" (New York Times). In Pan y Dulce he helps home bakers embrace the extraordinary world of Latin American baking and break free of Eurocentric approaches to the craft.
Ford delivers practical know-how alongside the history and culture behind each of 150 "mouthwatering" recipes (Pati Jinich, author of Treasures of the Mexican Table). This is an essential book for home bakers looking to expand their understanding of the craft--while tasting the best of México, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.

The complete, full-color graphic design guide for beginners

The field of graphic design is constantly evolving, with new design tools, methods, technology, and modes of expression being introduced all the time. Graphic Design For Dummies will teach you how to get started, introducing you to basic design principles as well as the latest best practices, software, and trends. You'll learn how to successfully plan and execute compelling design projects, even if you're not a trained designer. This fun and friendly book will empower you with the information you need to create design solutions. You'll also have the opportunity to test your skills with a series of interactive design activities, starting with step-by-step guidance and slowly building up your skills until you're ready to fly solo. Unleash your inner graphic designer with this Dummies guide.

Graphic Design For Dummies is a practical and user-friendly resource for those looking to create better design solutions quickly.

You don't need a kiln and an expensive at-home pottery rig to start crafting amazing pots and jars! In Making Pottery Without a Kiln: Happy Little Projects to Make for Your Home , author Daniela Schmidt-Kohl will teach you how. You'll discover a start-to-finish approach for beautifully creative pottery, beginning with harvesting your own clay and finishing with floral reliefs. Start fashioning decorative touches and you'll feel like you've been happily pottering for decades! Making Pottery Without a Kiln is great for beginners who want to learn, as well as advanced potters who want to get back to their roots. You'll find ideas for simple key racks and bowls, for example. Or level up with autumnal motifs and Christmas pendants! Invite people to join you with simple projects like little lucky charms or liven up your home with boho-chic wall mandalas. If you love working with your hands, there's something for you inside Making Pottery Without a Kiln. And you may just find out why forming something with your own hands is a "happiness maker," creating great vibes that last just as long as your new creations.

Renowned scientist Neil Shubin has made extraordinary discoveries by leading scientific expeditions to the sweeping ice landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctic. He’s survived polar storms, traveled in temperatures that can freeze flesh in seconds, and worked hundreds of miles from the nearest humans, all to deepen our understanding of our world.
Written with infectious enthusiasm and irresistible curiosity, Ends of the Earth blends travel writing, science, and history in a book brimming with surprising and wonderful discoveries. Shubin retraces his steps on a “dinosaur dance floor,” showing us where these beasts had populated the once tropical lands at the poles. He takes readers meteor hunting, as meteorites preserved in the ice can be older than our planet and can tell us about our galaxy’s formation. Readers also encounter insects and fish that develop their own anti-freeze, and aquatic life in ancient lakes hidden miles under the ice that haven’t seen the surface in centuries. It turns out that explorers and scientists have found these extreme environments as prime ground for making scientific breakthroughs across a vast range of knowledge. 
Shubin shares unforgettable moments from centuries of expeditions to reveal just how far scientists will go to understand polar regions. In the end, what happens at the poles does not stay in the poles—the ends of the earth offer profound stories that will forever change our view of life and the entire planet.

Pillars of Creation tells the story of one of the greatest scientific achievements in the history of civilization, a $10 billion instrument with a staggeringly ambitious goal: unlocking the secrets of the cosmos. Award-winning science writer Richard Panek stands us shoulder to shoulder with senior scientists as they conceive the mission, meet decades-long challenges to bring it to fruition, and, now, use its unprecedented technology to yield new discoveries about the origins of our solar system, to search for life on planets around other suns, and to trace the growth of hundreds of billions of galaxies all the way back to the birth of the first stars. The Webb telescope has captured the world's imagination, and Pillars of Creation shows how and why--including through sixteen pages of awe-inspiring, full-color photos.
At once a testament to human ingenuity and a celebration of mankind's biggest leap yet into the cosmos, Panek's eye-opening book reveals our universe as we've never seen it before--through the lens of the James Webb Space Telescope, a marvel that is itself a pillar of creation.

Perle Mesta was a force to be reckoned with. In her heyday - the 1940's, 50's and 60's - this extremely wealthy globe-trotting Washington widow was one of the most famous women in America, garnering as much media attention as Eleanor Roosevelt. Renowned for her world-class parties featuring politicians and celebrities, she was very close to three presidents - Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson. After Truman named her as the first female envoy to Luxembourg, Irving Berlin wrote an entire hit musical based on Perle's life - "Call Me Madam" - which starred Ethel Merman, ran on Broadway for two years and later became a movie.
Dubbed by Berlin as the "hostess with the mostess'," Perle inherited serious money (Texas oil) and married even more money (a Pittsburgh steel magnate). She had a rollicking life outside of Washington, befriending such Broadway legends as Merman, Angela Lansbury and Pearl Bailey. She also had a serious side. A pioneering supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment dating to the 1930's and influential champion for working women, she was a prodigious Democratic fundraiser and rescued Harry Truman's financially flailing 1948 campaign.
In this intensely researched biography, author Meryl Gordon chronicles Perle's lavish life and society adventures in Newport, Manhattan and Washington while highlighting her important, but nearly forgotten contribution to American politics and the feminist movement.

In the 1970s, a new wave of feminism was sweeping America. But in the boys' club of banking and finance, women were still infantilized--no credit without a male cosigner, and their income was dismissed as unreliable. If bankers weren't going to accommodate women, then women had to take control of their own futures. In 1978 in Denver, Colorado, the opening of the Women's Bank changed everything.

It was helmed by bank officer B. LaRae Orullian and the brainchild of whip-smart entrepreneur Carol Green, who forged a groundbreaking path with their headstrong colleagues, among them: Judi Foster, investment research whiz; Edna Mosley, unyielding civil rights advocate with the NAACP; Mary Roebling, renowned financial executive; Betty Freedman, a socialite and fundraiser; and Gail Schoettler, a formidable Denver mover and shaker for social justice. Coming together and facing their own unique road to revolution, they built the most successful female-run bank in the nation. It wasn't easy.

Give Her Credit follows the challenges, uphill battles, and achievements of some of the enterprising women of Denver who broke boundaries, inspired millions, and afforded opportunities for every marginalized citizen in the country. It's about time their untold story was told.

Chef and TV legend Dame Prue Leith brings us the cookbook you’ve always wanted – 80 delicious recipes, with accompanying kitchen shortcuts and hacks, for a lifetime of easy cooking. 
Every recipe in this book comes with a handy tip, plus you’ll find over 25 videos accessed by a QR code to help you learn a skill or get ahead.
Coined by Shirley Conran in her ’70s bestseller Superwoman, ‘Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom’ is a phrase that every time-poor cook can relate to. In this clever cookbook, you’ll find really good recipes without the fuss: recipes where a neat trick can save you time, recipes where the cheat versions taste just as good as the home-made, and recipes to help you avoid waste and save you money. How do you cook the perfect steak? What’s the best way to dice an avocado? And what about when it just all goes terribly wrong?
With recipes including Celeriac Rémoulade with Prosciutto, Rocket and Pine Nuts, Crispy Pork Belly, Buttermilk Chicken, Sushi for Scaredy-cats, Chocolate Almond Torte and Cherry Clafoutis, Prue’s handy hacks show you how a little bit of insight goes a long way.
Perfect for every home cook, the absolute beginner, or someone who has been doing it so long that cooking has somehow lost its attraction – Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom contains years of culinary know-how and inspirational meals, squashed into an accessible cookbook. 

The novelist Charles Bock was a reluctant parent, tagging along for the ride of fatherhood, obsessed primarily with his dream of a writing career.
But when his daughter Lily was six months old, his wife, Diana, was diagnosed with a complex form of leukemia. Two and half years later, when all treatments and therapies had been exhausted, Bock found himself a widower--devastated, drowning in medical bills, and saddled with a daunting responsibility. He had to nurture Lily, and, somehow, maybe even heal himself.
I Will Do Better is Charles's pull-no-punches account of what happened next. Playdates, music classes, temper tantrums, oh-so-cool babysitters, first days at school, family reunions, single-parent dating, and a citywide crippling natural disaster--were minefields especially treacherous for Charles and Lily because of their preexisting vulnerability: their grief.
Charles sought help from friends, family, and therapists, but this overgrown, middle-aged boy-man and his plucky child became, foremost, a duo--they found their way together.
This frank and tender memoir of parenting his infant daughter in the wake of of his wife's untimely death is "bracingly honest [and] tender," commented Publshers Weekly. "Single parents will find much to identify with in this warts-and-all account."

An entirely updated edition of the classic bestselling regional bird field guide from National Geographic, covering the U.S. and Canada east of the Rockies.
Provides ID information, data-driven maps, and annotated illustrations of more than 800 bird species.
Backyard beginners and dedicated life-listers alike will love the expanded new edition of this trusted guide to the birds of eastern United States and Canada. With new text, revised art, and data-derived range maps, this valuable resource complements the apps and online resources used by birders today.
All told, this second edition of the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of the United States and Canada-East (2nd edition) is a must-have guide for birders young and old, avid and beginner.

An entirely updated edition of the classic bestselling regional bird field guide from National Geographic, covering the western U.S. and Canada, including Hawaii.
Birdwatchers from the Rockies west will find nearly 1,000 species in this user-friendly guide, with all new text, updated art, and data-driven maps
Backyard beginners and dedicated life-listers alike will love the expanded new edition of this trusted guide to the birds of western United States and Canada, including Hawaii. With new text, revised art, and data-derived range maps, this valuable resource complements the apps and online resources used by birders today.
All told, this second edition of the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of the United States and Canada-West is a must-have guide for birders young and old, avid and beginner.

David Roberts was Whitney Houston's bodyguard, the real one. 
Roberts was hired in 1988 for Houston's UK portion of the Moment of Truth world tour. Accustomed to working for diplomats and Fortune 500 clients, Roberts had reservations about working with a pop star. But Houston's heart of gold won him over from the moment they met at Heathrow airport. 
There's a high bar for those who work in this business: you must be willing to die for your boss. Houston made that easy. Roberts got to travel the globe with one of the most fun-loving and generous souls he'd ever met. His memoir reveals heartwarming anecdotes of life with one of the world's most recognizable stars, including privately shared moments such as the birth of Bobbi Kristina.
But there are also shocking and heartbreaking revelations. Roberts was present for some of Houston's most challenging ordeals. And he was helpless as he watched those who claimed to love and support her look the other way because they saw her voice box as a cash machine. 
His heart was ultimately shattered as he witnessed her succumb to the one threat he could not protect her from: herself.

While serving as the deputy Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times, Chinese-British journalist Yuan Yang began to notice common threads in the lives of her Chinese peers—women born during China’s turn toward capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, who, despite the country's enormous economic gains during their lifetimes, were coming up against deeply entrenched barriers as they sought to achieve financial stability.
The product of seven years of intimate, in-depth reporting, this transporting and indelible book traces the journey of four such women as they try to make better lives for themselves and their families in the new Chinese economy. June and Siyue are among the few in their villages to graduate high school. Each makes her way to Beijing, June as a young professional and Siyue an entrepreneur. Like Siyue, Leiya lives with her grandparents in their village while her parents send money home; yearning for a different life than those of the women she sees around her, Leiya soon joins her parents in Shenzhen as an underage factory worker. Born to an urban middle-class family, Sam is outraged when her eyes are opened the poor treatment of workers, and becomes a labor activist, increasingly under threat by the authorities.
As the women grapple with government policies that threaten their businesses, their children's access to education, their choice of where to make a home, and, in Sam’s case, their lives, a vivid, damning, and urgent picture emerges of the previously unseen human cost of China’s rising economic tide—and the courage and perseverance of those caught in the swell.

When Nancy Reddy had her first child, she found herself suddenly confronted with the ideal of a perfect mother—a woman who was constantly available, endlessly patient, and immediately invested in her child to the exclusion of all else. Reddy had been raised by a single working mother, considered herself a feminist, and was well on her way to a PhD. Why did doing motherhood "right" feel so wrong?
For answers, Reddy turned to the mid-20th century social scientists and psychologists whose work still forms the basis of so much of what we believe about parenting. It seems ludicrous to imagine modern moms taking advice from midcentury researchers. Yet, their bad ideas about so-called “good” motherhood have seeped so pervasively into our cultural norms. In The Good Mother Myth, Reddy debunks the flawed lab studies, sloppy research, and straightforward misogyny of researchers from Harry Harlow, who claimed to have discovered love by observing monkeys in his lab, to the famous Dr. Spock, whose bestselling parenting guide included just one  illustration of a father interacting with his child.
This timely and thought-provoking book will make you laugh, cry, and want to scream (sometimes all at once). Blending history of science, cultural criticism, and memoir, The Good Mother Myth pulls back the curtain on the flawed social science behind our contemporary understanding of what makes a good mom.

From the bestselling author of The Taking of Jemima Boone, the unbelievable true story of a real-life Swiss Family Robinson (and their dog) who faced sharks, shipwreck, and betrayal.

On December 10, 1887, a shark fishing boat disappeared. On board the doomed vessel were the Walkers--the ship's captain Frederick, his wife Elizabeth, their three teenage sons, and their dog--along with the ship's crew. The family had spotted a promising fishing location when a terrible storm arose, splitting their vessel in two and leaving those onboard adrift on the perilous sea.

When the castaways awoke the next morning, they discovered they had been washed ashore--on an island inhabited by a large but ragged and emaciated man who introduced himself as Hans. Hans appeared to have been there for a while and could quickly educate the Walkers and their crew on the island's resources. But Hans had a secret . . . and as the Walker family gradually came to learn more, what seemed like a stroke of luck to have the mysterious man's assistance became something ominous, something darker.

Like David Grann and Stacy Schiff, Matthew Pearl unveils one of the most incredible yet little-known historical true stories, and the only known instance in history of an actual family of castaways. Save Our Souls asks us to consider who we might become if we found ourselves trapped on a deserted island.

Four septuagenarians with a few tricks up their sleeves
A female cop with her first big case
A brutal murder
Welcome to...
THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB
In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves the Thursday Murder Club. 
When a local developer is found dead with a mysterious photograph left next to the body, the Thursday Murder Club suddenly find themselves in the middle of their first live case. 
As the bodies begin to pile up, can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer, before it's too late?

FBI Agent Gardner Camden is an analytical genius with an affinity for puzzles. He also has a blind spot on the human side of investigations, a blindness that sometimes even includes people in his own life, like his beloved seven-year-old daughter Camila. Gardner and his squad of brilliant yet quirky agents make up the Patterns and Recognition (PAR) unit, the FBI’s hidden edge, brought in for cases that no one else can solve
When DNA links a murder victim to a serial killer long presumed dead, the team springs into action. A second victim establishes a pattern, and the murderer begins leaving a trail of clues and riddles especially for Gardner. And while the PAR team is usually relegated to working cold cases from behind a desk, the investigation puts them on the road and into the public eye, following in the footsteps of a killer.
Along with Gardner, PAR consists of a mathematician, a weapons expert, a computer analyst, and their leader, a career agent. Each of them must use every skill they have to solve the riddle of the killer’s identity. But with the perpetrator somehow learning more and more about the team at PAR, can they protect themselves and their families...before it’s too late?

A high-end wedding on a private island off the coast of Seattle sounds like something out of a magazine. But for bestselling mystery author Kate Valentine, it’s more like a nightmare.
Why Kate agreed to attend her ex-fiancé’s wedding is its own enigma, but she’ll plaster on a fake smile for two nights, with the aid of free champagne, naturally. And because the groom happens to be her editor, she’ll try to finish a draft of her latest Loretta Starling mystery as a wedding gift.
When the bride is poisoned and Kate stumbles across a dead body, she finds herself in a real-life mystery that eerily echoes the plot of her latest novel. And the only person who seems willing to help Kate catch the killer is Jake Hawkins, aka: the Hostralian; aka: Kate’s biggest romantic regret.
As the wine flows and the weather threatens to hold every guest hostage, bitter resentments and long-held grudges surface amongst the colorful crowd. Anyone could be capable of murder, it seems. What would Loretta do? Unfortunately, Kate doesn’t have a clue.