From the Dust Jacket: Devastated by the loss of her husband in an accident, Lana Porter is suddenly thrust into a role she’s unprepared for: single parent. Jack was the one who always showed up at the basketball games, delivered the lectures, taught the heavy lessons to their two teenage girls: Beth, the “good” daughter, and Micki, the adopted “wild” one. Lana is convinced she’s a failure, especially after the surprise appearance of Micki’s wealthy birth father sets off a firestorm of sibling rivalry. What will it take for this family to survive?

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About the Author: Drusilla Campbell lives in San Diego with her husband, horses, and dogs. She is co-founder of The Writer’s Room, and speaks and teaches at writing conferences throughout Southern California.

Edith, sixty-seven, wakes on Christmas morning to find her husband Art lying next to her, dead. Their shotgun wedding, forty-some years before, has not led to a happy-ever-after scenario. Edith is pretty sure she doesn’t like Art, perhaps never has, and she is sure he has felt the same way, but their senses of responsibility have kept them together. Edith has focused on raising her son Brian, who has become successful in all parts of his life: job, marriage, fatherhood, and he is the joy of her life, just about the only one. Art is cremated and buried, but a mystery uncovered by an autopsy (required because of his sudden, unexpected demise) involves a high alcohol blood content, barbiturates, and Valium. Art, to Edith’s knowledge, did not take sedatives or other psychotropic drugs, drank, yes, but not to excess. The insurance company questions the possibility of suicide and the resulting lower payout. Edith, so angry at her husband for guilt-punishing her and their son in this way, goes through the dead man’s pockets, discovers a secret life involving bars, restaurants, a hotel, and as she follows up on the clues to this life—matchbooks, receipts, a pink Kleenex—she discovers Art’s connection to an l8-year-old girl, dark-skinned, curly wig, and beautiful. She also meets the girl’s social worker and Seth, a good-looking older black man who says she is handsome. Edith, trying to begin life over, is glad she’s had her hair colored and a make-over. In the meantime, Brian’s wife Kathleen reveals that Brian is coming home at night smelling like another woman, sometimes like citrus. He’s taken large sums out of their savings account. Brian, the perfect son, apparently isn’t so perfect. Edith hasn’t liked Kathleen much, but their husbands’ secret transgressions bring the two women closer, and they separately and together attempt to find out what is going on. The men, one dead, the other saying, “It’s going to be all right,” aren’t talking. Their clues lead them to a bar, to a rib joint, to a high-class restaurant, and to the Hilton; Edith agrees to meet Latisha, who calls herself Art’s friend, and who is about to go to college. Kathleen discovers more money missing and that Brian has a code in his datebook that indicates secret meetings. She goes to a lawyer, discusses divorce. Edith decides that Latisha, the black-haired teenager, may be either Art’s lover or his daughter. Either way, she’s had it with Art’s secrets, but somewhere in her sleepless nights she also realizes that if he committed suicide, it could have been her fault, her un-love of him. A phone call from a kind policemen lessens her guilt about his death, but not about what Art might have been up to the nights he left the house late at night, coming home smelling like alcohol and one night, oranges. Seth and the social worker who has worked with Latisha are brother and sister. They know more than anyone what has gone on, what is happening at this point, including who Latisha’s mother is. But not everything. They don’t know who is paying for Latisha’s college tuition and that both Art and Brian have been involved with Patsy, Latisha’s mother. Brian isn’t the perfect son Edith believed he was, and the mysteries settle into truths, as he confesses to his mother. Edith discovers that Art’s pockets have revealed his secrets and have brought her a new life.

From the Dust Jacket: “In 1930, when I was five years old, a bushel of corn sold for twenty-five cents; that is, if you could find anybody that would buy a bushel of corn. Which was not likely...”

Little Tree was five, and an orphan, when he went to live in his Cherokee grandparents Tennessee log cabin with the mountain at its back and the clear water of the spring branch in front. Granma gave him a bed of deerhide webbing and a pair of moccasins made to fit soft and giving. From Granpa he absorbed the simple, imperishable Cherokee ethic of living—to give love without expecting gratitude, and to take from the land only what you need.

This autobiographical story of Forrest Carter’s boyhood illuminates the almost mystical communion between the Indian and his land—a feeling that goes far beyond what we call ecology. Little Tree sees seasons come and go from the mountain rim, watches a mountain storm: When Nature is birthing spring, learns bird signs and wind songs and which crops to plant by the dark of the moon. He hears the true story of the famous Cherokee Trail of Tears, and why it is not the Indian who wept, but the watching white man. From a Jewish peddler, he learns a lesson in charity; from a sharecropper he learns to understand misplaced pride. He escapes death through Granpa’s courage, and confronts, for the first time, the hypocrisy and brutality of white Americans.

Little Tree’s education might be compared to the story of the television’s The Waltons—but it is far more realistic and moving, and set in the real 1930s. It reaches its climax as Little Tree endures a brief, harsh stay in a sanctimonious denominational orphanage, and returns home to share the bittersweet splendor of his grandparents’ old age.

“Maybe we knew time was getting close, but we didn’t speak of it. We lived it full. We pointed out things like the reddest of the leaves in the fall, the bluest violet in the spring, so we all tasted and shared the feeling together. ... Granma said when you come on something that is good, first thing to do is share it with whoever you can find; that way, the good spreads out to where no telling it will go. Which is right.”

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About the Author: Forrest Carter, creator of “Josey Wales,” now becomes his own most unforgettable hero; his Indian name is Little Tree, and the adventures and education of Little Tree are his own. He has been a cowhand all over the South and Southwest, with his main interest always remaining the history of his people. Reviewing his first novel, King Features Syndicate wrote, “Mr. Carter, a part-blood Cherokee who is Storyteller in Council to the Cherokee Nations, is a first-rate yarn spinner? ... He has a great talent.”

The movie of Forrest Carter’s first novel Gone to Texas was filmed as a major motion picture called The Outlaw—Josey Wales with Clint Eastwood in the title role.

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Compiler’s Note: Although originally published as a memoir, it was subsequently revealed that the story was entirely a work of fiction by Asa (“Ace”) Carter (1925-1979), a well-known white supremacist and segregationist who was best known as a speechwriter for George C. Wallace. See also, the documentary The Reconstruction of Asa Carter. Carter is also the author of The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (1973) under the pseudonym Nathan Forrest Carter, which was the basis for the Clint Eastwood film.

From the Back Cover: Holly Anderson discovers that her biological mother was a well-respected adventure writer, who had prepared for her untimely death by requesting that Holly write the final book of her best-selling series.

Charged with what appears to be an impossible task, Holly journeys to the home of her eccentric aunt in the West Village, where she must deal with a trail of past murders, the “Henry Curse,” and the increasingly relentless harassment of the media.

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About the Author: Nicole Parris earned a degree from Ferrum College, and also holds a master’s degree in education. She lives in Orlando, Florida, with her husband, Jason, and son, Tanner.

Eisess, takes place in the year 3000 and brings a battle of good vs. evil to a whole new level, or should I say a new planet. When Robert gets tricked into touching the Orb of Darkness, his soul ends up on the Midnight Planet, Darkundo. This planet is home of Eisess’ evil sister Myra. Darkundo was once part of Pluto, but it got split in half years ago separating the two sisters, and sending Myra into the sinister depths of the galaxy. The darkness transformed the entire planet into a breeding ground for evil of all sorts. Eisess is a light blue ice monster that came from Pluto to Earth by Halley’s comet. She looks like a skeleton with light blue skin, and she has a very powerful ability over ice. She is nine thousand years old, but she only looks twenty. Her strength seems to be a derivation of people’s fear, because she grows stronger when people are afraid of her. Robert is one of the three “chosen ones” who must work together with a Bulldog named Charlie, and a black Lab named Marcello to stop Eisess’ evil revenge scheme. Otherwise she is going to destroy Earth for what happened to her 5,000 to 4,000 years ago. Charlie has the power of teleportation, while Marcello has the power of invincibility. Both dogs have eternal youth which was given to them by the ancient heroes to stay safe while fighting Eisess the very first time.

From the Dust Jacket: The night that Hale-Bopp streaks across the skies over Vancouver, Liz Dunn has nothing in her life but impending oral surgery and a verklempt-o-thon of movie rentals to get her through her lonely convalescence. She is plump, quiet and single—nobody’s wife, nobody’s mother. “The little teenage girls in their spray-on denim and sparkly lip gloss take one look at me, recognize me as a cosmic danger signal, then never look at me again. Men of all ages don’t notice me. To them, I’ma fern. Women older than, say, thirty notice me and treat me kindly ... I’m what will happen to them if they don’t play their cards right.” Liz Dunn is almost resigned to her fate.

But then a second comet hurtles through her life, in the form of a young man in makeup and fishnet stockings who, mysteriously, has her name inscribed on his Medic Alert bracelet: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, CONTACT LIZ DUNN. One phone call really can change a life.

The unlikely places we find love, the peculiar power of visions, the lonely planet, the war on terrorism, fundamentalism and dirty bombs: by the end of this tender, irresistible novel, Liz Dunn’s solitary existence is upended by ail of them. And when she manages to stumble across a happy ending, no one is more surprised than she.

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About the Author: Douglas Coupland was born on a NATO base in Germany in 1961. A visual artist, designer and internationally bestselling author, Coupland has published eight previous novels, including Generation X, All Families Are Psychotic and Hey Nostradamus!, which was named a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2003 and won the fiction prize awarded by the Canadian Authors Association. He lives and works in Vancouver.

From the Dust Jacket: At thirty-five, unmarried, Beth Sumner had come to India to visit her sister and to escape the emptiness and frustration of her life in America. That she had barely enough money to return scarcely mattered, since there was neither work nor home to return to.

Then, in the crowded third-class compartment of the train to Kasappur, she encountered Mr. Alagarsami—poet, merchant, a widower with no legal heir, unhappy under the domination of a meddling mother and an autocratic uncle. Despite all the barriers of culture, they liked one another instantly.

But Kasappur, Beth discovered, was rightly named the Abode of Bitterness. There, Mr. Alagarsami was engaged in a paradoxical and heartbreaking struggle with Beth’s sister and brother-in-law, who had adopted his small son. A succession of misunderstandings and insults eventually leads to a crisis when their relationship seems in ruins.

Many distinguished novelists have written of India. Robin White has a deep knowledge of his subject and a natural gift for story-telling, and this first novel, which won the Harper Prize in America, places his alongside the best of them.

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About the Author: Robin White, a child of missionary parents, was born in India in 1928 and lived there until he was sixteen. He was then sent back to the United States, where he was educated at high school in Connecticut and at Yale. Married with three children, he supports himself and his family entirely through writing. His short stories have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, and many other magazines.

Ken never knew why his Mom treated him differently when he was still a child. His sister was almost three years younger than him, and his little brother was much younger. Mom loved them all equally, yet ... when she hugged Ken it always felt as if she was reluctant to give him her full love. Ken was a grown man, in his forties when his mother died. Then his father revealed a secret concerning his birth just before dying. Now Ken sets his mind on unraveling the mystery. He leaves on a quest to find his origins, embarking on an improbable journey This is a story of self-discovery, a contemporary fantasy, unfolding the fantastic tale of the Elf Prince.

What happens when an adoptive child starts looking for his mother after 20 years? Will she survive breast cancer to meet her child? This sometimes shocking coming-of-age novel takes us back to Elizabeth’s childhood to relive her memories.

From the Dust Jacket: “When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy.”

With that opening sentence we are introduced to the eleven-year-old heroine of Ellen Foster, a stunning novel by Kaye Gibbons.

Ellen Foster tells her own story, with an honesty, a perceptivity, and a quite un-self-conscious heroism. Her mother dies. She stays with her father until it becomes too dangerous. She lives with a teacher, a grandmother who blames her for her father’s marriage, then with an aunt. At the close she discovers a home where at last she is wanted and loved.

Ellen Foster takes things as they come. She judges people shrewdly and well. Her ties with her little black friend Starletta are beautifully revealed. Her own courage, her humor, and her wisdom are unforgettable.

Kaye Gibbons’ first novel is one to be read over and over. As Walker Percy says, it is “lovely, breathtaking, sometimes heart-wrenching.” The little girl’s absence of self-pity, her determination, and her gratitude to those who help her, make her a heroine who lives beyond the printed page. She takes a place in our hearts.

What is so striking is Kaye Gibbons’ way of telling a story. In Eudora Welty’s words, “the life in it, the honesty of thought and eye and feeling and word!”

You will love Ellen Foster. Once you read it, it will be unforgettable. And you will be enthralled with the story-telling mastery of a young North Carolina author who is on the threshold of a lengthy and distinguished literary career.

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About the Author: Kaye Gibbons was born in rural Nash County, North Carolina, in 1960. She graduated from Rocky Mount Senior High School, attended North Carolina State University, and is currently completing her requirements for a degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has received National Honor Society and North Carolina Veterans Association scholarships and was a finalist for the National Council of Teachers Writing Award. She has published poetry and fiction in several magazines. She and her husband and their three-year-old daughter Mary live in Raleigh, North Carolina.

In 1958, nine-year-old Denny Gunderson’s parents are killed in a car accident leaving her older sister, Judy, to raise her. Judy berates Denny throughout her preadolescent and adolescent years—instilling in her that she is unloved, indecent, and will never amount to anything. At the age of seventeen, Denny becomes pregnant by her high-school sweetheart, Ray Collins, and finds Judy’s prophecy of her to be correct—or so she thinks; treated like a fallen woman by everyone except her best friend, Rhonda, and her mother. Hiding her shame in The Meadow Ridge Home, a residence for unwed mothers, Denny gives birth, but afterwards heads on a downward spiral; a direct result of her shame, the pain of giving up her child, and her pent up anger towards Judy, Ray, and society in general. In her desperate state, she experiences hope and believes it was not by coincidence that this encounter happened. She decides to rid herself of the paralyzing demons of her past that keep her from going forward with her life.

From the Dust Jacket (U.K. edition): The haunting story of Emmeline Mosher might seem the work of too strange and perverse a turn of chance had it not actually happened. At the age of ninety-four, a woman called Nettie Mitchell recounted the story to Harry Wiland, who passed it into the sympathetic and talented hands of Judith Rossner. Nettie Mitchell had known Emmeline when she herself was a child and Emmeline an old woman. It is a tale that withholds its mysteries until the eruptive moments when they can be contained no longer—one which compels the reader to follow Emmeline’s every action with compassion and a shiver of undefinable dread.

Emmeline was alarmed when Aunt Hannah announced on her visit that great numbers of young girls like herself were employed at the cotton mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, to help ease their families’ burdens when they fell on hard times. Times were perilous for the Moshers just then: their farm in Fayette, Maine, yielded little enough without the killing frost of June 1839. At thirty-one, Emmeline’s mother had nine children who were living on scarcely more than the pretence of mealtimes. Would they send her away ? Emmeline wondered. The thought of leaving home and her mother overwhelmed her with horror.

It was decided. Not yet fourteen, she was dispatched to Lowell, where the factory noise was so great she had to fight off tears and nausea, where working hours were merciless for a beginner’s fifty-five cents a week and the girls in her boarding-house didn’t seem to want to befriend her. Mr. Maguire in the weaving-room advised her to think as little as possible. He seemed the only one willing to show her pure consideration when she was starved of it, and despite her landlady’s puzzling disparagement of the easy-going Irishman, Emmeline began to think of him as her only friend. Though her first glimpse into a full-length looking-glass had filled Emmeline with disgust and humiliation, one of the older girls told her it was time she learned that she was pretty. Very pretty.

Emmeline’s plight at this and the later cataclysmic points of her life are conveyed by Judith Rossner with tender conviction. The settings of nineteenth-century industrial and rural New England are drawn to the last detail with life-like immediacy. The course of Emmeline’s fate must not even be hinted. Under Judith Rossner’s superb narrative direction, it unfolds for us with the same fearful, bizarre inevitability as it did for Emmeline.

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About the Author: Judith Rossner’s previous novels are To the Precipice (1966), Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid (1969), Any Minute I Can Split (1972), Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1975), and Attachments (1977).

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By the Same Author: August (1983, Houghton Mifflin Co.), among others.

From the Dust Jacket: The Year is 2020. The newly reconstituted New American Commonwealth is on course to defeat the French and bring democracy to a troubled world.

Miriam Burgeson, commissioner in charge of the espionage agency tasked with catalyzing the Commonwealth’s great leap forward, has a problem. For years, she’s warned everyone of the threat from a different set of Americans in a parallel world. Now those Americans’ drones have arrived. And that other America has recruited Rita, Miriam’s estranged daughter, to spy across time lines and bring down any who might threaten national security.

Two nuclear superpowers are set on a collision course. Two increasingly desperate paratime espionage agencies are fumbling around in the dark, trying to find a solution to the first-contact problem that doesn’t result in a nuclear holocaust. And two women—a mother and her long-lost daughter—are about to find themselves on opposite sides.

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About the Author: Charles Stross was born in Leeds, England, in 1964. He has worked as a pharmacist, software engineer, and freelance journalist, but now writes full-time. To date, Stross has won three Hugo Awards and been a finalist fifteen times. He has also won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, Best Novella, and Best Fantasy Novel, and has been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award [twice] and for the Nebula Award. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife, Feòrag, a couple of cats, several thousand books, and an ever-changing herd of obsolescent computers.

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By the Same Author: The Family Trade (2004); The Hidden Family (2005); The Clan Corporate 2006); The Merchants’ War (2007); and The Apocalypse Codex (2012, Ace Books), among many others.

From the Back Cover: Catharine Chase’s entire life is built on a secret. In 1972, at the tender age of sixteen, she got pregnant. An embarrassment to her parents, Catharine was exiled to a maternity home to carry out her pregnancy far away from the watchful eyes of their tight-knit community. What they didn’t tell her is that she wouldn’t be allowed to keep her baby.

With her daughter’s screams still echoing in her ears, the medical staff told Catharine she’d move on with her life and have more children, they promised she’d forget. But they were wrong. Catharine never forgot Emily. And when she and her husband, Paul, learn that they can’t have children, she risks her job, her marriage, and her family’s reputation in a desperate attempt to find the daughter she never wanted to give away and reclaim her only chance to be a mother.

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About the Author: Erika Liodice is the founder of the award-winning motivational blog, Beyond the Gray, where she shares her journey to publication while encouraging readers to reach for their own dreams. She is a contributor to literary and travel sites, including Writer Unboxed, The Savvy Explorer, and Lehigh Valley InSite. She received a B.S. in Business and Economics from Lehigh University and studied fiction writing at Gotham Writers’ Workshop. Erika lives in Bethlehem, PA, with her husband.

When Pippa Dunn, adopted as an infant and raised terribly British, discovers that her birth parents are from the American South, she finds that “culture clash” has layers of meaning she’d never imagined. Meet The English American, a fabulously funny, deeply poignant debut novel that sprang from Larkin’s autobiographical one-woman show of the same name.

In many ways, Pippa Dunn is very English: she eats Marmite on toast, knows how to make a proper cup of tea, has attended a posh English boarding school, and finds it entirely familiar to discuss the crossword rather than exchange any cross words over dinner with her proper English family. Yet Pippa—creative, disheveled, and impulsive to the core—has always felt different from her perfectly poised, smartly coiffed sister and steady, practical parents, whose pastimes include Scottish dancing, gardening, and watching cricket.

When Pippa learns at age twenty-eight that her birth parents are from the American South, she feels that lifelong questions have been answered. She meets her birth mother, an untidy, artistic, free-spirited redhead, and her birth father, a charismatic (and politically involved) businessman in Washington, D.C.; and she moves to America to be near them. At the same time, she relies on the guidance of a young man with whom she feels a mysterious connection; a man who discovered his own estranged father and who, like her birth parents, seems to understand her in a way that no one in her life has done before. Pippa feels she has found her “self” and everything she thought she wanted. But has she?

Caught between two opposing cultures, two sets of parents, and two completely different men, Pippa is plunged into hilarious, heart-wrenching chaos. The birth father she adores turns out to be involved in neoconservative activities she hates; the mesmerizing mother who once abandoned her now refuses to let her go. And the man of her fantasies may be just that...

With an authentic adopted heroine at its center, Larkin’s compulsively readable first novel unearths universal truths about love, identity, and family with wit, warmth, and heart.

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About the Author: Alison Larkin was adopted at birth in Washington, D.C., by British parents and raised in England and Africa. After graduation from the University of London and the Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, she became a regular on the British stage with appearances on Broadway, a ubiquitous voice-over artist, and a successful stand-up comic. Her internationally acclaimed one-woman show, The English American, was a highlight of the London Comedy Festival.

The U-552 and the sinking of the Chinese Prince during the height of the Battle of the Atlantic. These two, would conspire against David’s future. Taking his life in a new and at the time unknown direction, that would remain secret for 60 years. Armed with this information and David’s love of history meant he was determined to find out who his real birth parents were and in doing so unfold a story of coincidence and tragedy. How a series of events came together, to change David’s destiny. With the backdrop of World War, this true story tells of a journey of self discovery and unearthing the past.

From the Dust Jacket: Sam. An ordinary suburban teenager, her life mapped out by friendships, homework and hanging round the town on Saturdays. Experiments with fags, eyeliner and sweet cider. Listening to the Top 40 in the bath on Sunday nights, imagining what it would be like to be kissed. Properly.

Sam loves her twin sister, and their mother and father. A happy, secure world.

Except this is a story about adoption, not orthodox family life. It’s about identity and stolen histories, not a gentle coming of age. It’s about coincidence, obsession with blood, about good love versus bad. And, in the end, it’s about forgiveness.

Set in the late seventies and early eighties, against a backdrop of secrets, sex, and spiky pop, Eskimo Kissing marks the arrival of an exciting new storyteller.

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About the Author: Kate Mosse is the author of two nonfiction books, Becoming a Mother and The House, published earlier this year to accompany the award-winning BBC2 series on the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. This is her first novel. She is also a founder of the Orange Prize for Fiction and was the 1996 Chair of Judges.

Kate Mosse is now working on a second novel, a pregnancy book for men and the television series of Eskimo Kissing.

From the Publisher: Hester Chapman’s novel, considered her most ambitious at the time of publication, and also her most entertaining. Planned on an ample, Victorian scale, but concerned with life in Edwardian days, it admits us to that lost world of plenty, where the prosperous middle and professional classes, so confident of their investments and of their standards of conduct, did not always allow enough for the forces of human nature.

Two children are involved in her story—a brother and sister brought up by a devoted mother-by-adoption. Victoire, wife of the head of a preparatory school, has the best of good intentions and the loftiest of high principles, but with them she has also a desire for domination; her love is too possessive, her devotion craves for submission in return.

She is beautiful, amusing, irresistibly charming, and she is much loved and admired—by the children unquestioningly, with reservations by her husband and by others. “How,” she is to ask herself, “how did I fail them?” The answer has been stealthily imparted to the reader in the course of this finely articulated novel, with its wealth and variety of characters, and its perfect and yet unobtrusive re-creation of the atmosphere of the period.

The dramatic climax is never to be guessed at. Its narrator was Victoire’s most constant admirer; to the last he is not sure whether he has been favourite or victim.

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About the Author: Hester W. Chapman (1899-1976) was one of the well-known authors and a specialist on the Tudors and Stuarts.

Lewis Book, a doctor with a history of embroiling himself in conflicts, and his daughter, Sophie, travel to Nepal to join a climbing expedition. One evening, as Sophie sits on the border between China and Nepal, watching the sun set over the Himalayas, she spots a group of Tibetan refugees fleeing from Chinese soldiers. When shooting starts, Dr. Book rushes toward the ensuing melee, ignoring the objections of Lawson, the expedition leader, who doesn’t want to get involved and spoil his chance to be the first climber to summit Kyatruk. Lawson is further enraged when Amaris, a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker recording the expedition, joins Book with her camcorder in hand. When the surviving Tibetans are captured just short of the border, Lawson and Sophie look on helplessly as Book and Amaris are taken away with them, down the glacier into China. From that point, Lawson continues his ascent, and the fugitives are caught in an explosive and thrilling pursuit that will test their convictions, courage and endurance. From one of Canada’s finest writers comes a literary page-turner of the highest order. Inspired by an actual event, Every Lost Country is a gripping novel about heroism, human failings, and what love requires. When is it acceptable to be a bystander, and when do life and loyalty demand more. About the Author: Steven Heighton is the author of the novel Afterlands, which has appeared in six countries; was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice along with a best book of the year selection in ten publications in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K.; and has been optioned for film. He is also the author of The Shadow Boxer, a Canadian bestseller and a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year. His work has been translated into ten languages, and his poems and stories have appeared in London Review öf Books, Poetry, Tin House, The Walrus, Europe, Agni, Poetry London, Brick, Best English Stories and many others. Heighton has won several awards, including three golds for fiction and poetry in the National Magazine Awards, and has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Journey Prize and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award.

From the Back Cover: Treha Langsam is a mysterious young woman who has fallen through the cracks, much like many of the elderly people she works with at Desert Gardens. But Miriam Howard, director of the assisted-living facility, sees her extraordinary gift and untapped potential. Treha is a whisperer of sorts, calling those who have slipped into dementia back to a life of vibrant, if only temporary, clarity.

When a documentary team stumbles onto Treha’s story, her gift is discovered and the search for answers about her past begins. As the truth slowly unravels, Treha and those around her must each tackle a difficult question: if this is as good as life gets, is chat enough?

With authentic characterizations and riveting prose, bestselling author Chris Fabry delivers an uplifting, human tale of an ordinary woman with an extraordinary gift.

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About the Author: Chris Fabry is a 1982 graduate of the W. Page Pitt School of Journalism at Marshall University and a native of West Virginia. He is heard on Moody Radio’s Chris Fabry Live!, Love Worth Finding, and Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman. He and his wife, Andrea, are the parents of nine children. Chris has published more than seventy books for adults and children. His novel Dogwood won a Christy Award in 2009. In 2011 Almost Heaven won a Christy Award and the ECPA Christian Book Award for fiction.

From the Dust Jacket: Nineteen-year-old Iris Sunnaret, her sister Angie, and brothers Perry and Eddie live happily in a family that adopted them after their mother’s accidental death and their military father’s abandonment. The youngest of the children, Iris has few clear memories of her mother and father, and no reason to question anything she’s been told by the adoptive parents she loves and trusts. She believes her world is secure, knowable, immovable.

But then history intervenes in the form of the Vietnam War, and her brothers are drawn into the conflict when they volunteer to serve overseas. Neither returns—Eddie’s body and dog tags are recovered in a jungle clearing, and Perry simply vanishes. According to official records, both died bravely in combat on the same day, but a man who served in their platoon appears on the family’s doorstep months later, offering to tell them what really happened. Perry saved the lives of the men in his platoon countless times, the man says, and the last time he saved us, he did it by killing his brother.

In an instant, Iris’s idyllic world is gone. Her family dismisses the veteran’s nightmarish story as false, and tries to move past their loss. But confusion and grief pit them against one another. Angie, who had always been Iris’s protector and confidante, breaks away and plunges into dangerous political and sexual alliances. When Iris reaches out to her, hoping for reconciliation, Angie insists that now everyone must choose a side. You can’t be the peacemaker, the baby in the family, anymore, her sister says. That’s over.

Finally, Iris takes the only stand that she can imagine, and sets out to find what really happened to her brothers. The path she follows brings her into unfamiliar territory: the Iroquois Nation, the Italian neighborhood of a small New York town, and buried parts of her own past. What she discovers will tear apart and then reweave her relationship with her sister, and propel her into adulthood and the liberating and consuming experience of love.

A classic drama about the forces that can change a family, Everything After is a heartbreaking and redemptive exploration of the clash of the personal, the moral, and the political on the wartime home front.

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About the Author: Sharon Pywell is the author of What Happened to Henry. Her work has appeared in several publications, including The Antioch Review, Western Humanities Review, The Southern Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. A former MacDowell fellow, she teaches in the Boston metropolitan area.

From the Publisher: Over 16,000,000 men served in the armed forces in WWII. Perhaps as many as 3%, or 480,000, had a homosexual orientation. Admittedly, several thousand were screened out before being inducted, and some later received Undesirable Discharges. 120,000 of these men saw combat action, and undoubtedly hundreds were killed, and thousands were wounded. Jack Scott, by far the most outstanding seventeen-year-old in a small town in Arkansas, is forced to confront this problem both at home and in the military. This story is his, and to a degree, the stories of his family, his friends, and his comrades in combat. The problem is handled sympathetically, if realistically.

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Compiler’s Note: Adoption connection is unclear; I include it because it popped up on a subject search on Amazon.com. It also appears to have been published under the title The Rings of Misfortune.

From the Back Cover: WHAT HAPPENS TO THE WOMAN WHO HAS EVERYTHING, WHEN SHE IS DENIED THE ONE THING ALL WOMEN TAKE FOR GRANTED?

Nelly Diamond is a successful executive in her thirties who has delayed motherhood until “later” and who suddenly awakens to the realization that it’s now or never!

If the doctor had told Nelly ten years ago that she wasn’t pregnant she would have rejoiced at her good fortune. But now her slumbering maternal instinct has awakened with a vengeance. Increasingly obsessed with having a child by fair means or foul, she submits herself to infertility work-ups, test-tube baby researchers, adoption agencies, step-motherhood, and even kidnapping, with riotously funny results. For Nelly is not a woman to take defeat lying down; before she gives up she’ll try absolutely anything to get her own nine month miracle...

Expecting Miracles is an hilarious and deeply affecting novel that explores an important theme for contemporary women. It is both an impressive evocation of a generation's emerging dilemma and a touching portrait of an engaging woman who succeeds against all odds.

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About the Author: Linda Howard Urbach is the author of Madame Bovary’s Daughter (Random House, 2011). She is currently working on a new novel, Sarah’s Hair, the story of Sarah Bernhardt’s hairdresser. She is the originator of “MoMoirs: The Umbilical Cord Stops Here!” a theatrical production in conjunction with Theatre Arts Workshop of Norwalk. She is also the creator of MoMoirs-Writing Workshops For and About Mothers. A MoMoirs anthology is soon to be published: I’ll give you something to cry about! Expecting Miracles was first published by Putnam’s (under the name Linda U. Howard.) The movie rights sold to Paramount pictures. Jill Clayburgh was slated to star in the film but the movie was never made. She co-authored with Roberto Mitrotti “The Secret Diary of Sigmund Freud” (20th Century Fox Specialized Film Division). Her one-act play “Scenes from A Cell” was a finalist in the 2002 New England One Act Festival. She also taught creative writing at the Westport Writers Workshop. Linda lives in Black Rock, Connecticut without a dog. She has one perfect daughter, Charlotte.

Sometimes, children die. The Extraordinary Situation Family Reassignment Agency is trying to change that. The Extraordinary Situation Family Reassignment Agency is not a normal adoption agency, as Simon recently discovered. It was hard enough to find out that his parents were not actually his parents, but the circumstances that brought them together were almost unbelievable. Because this agency has an unusual mandate: to rescue children from the brink of death; those extraordinary situations, be they disaster, disease, or war, that end a child’s life all too soon. All throughout history, children have died tragically; but time is no barrier for TESFRA. Wherever and whenever a child is in danger, The Extraordinary Situation Family Reassignment Agency is there to give him or her a second chance at life.

As a pediatric intern, Dr. Rose Gorman takes care of Hunter Wilson, a six-month-old boy suffering from a severe mitochondrial disorder. She cares deeply for Hunter and his family and is present at his bedside through the most difficult times. The experiences change Rose, and she remains close friends with Hunter’s parents, Jonathan and Samantha. Rose continues her work as a pediatrician and cares for 18-year-old Hope Shields. When Hope learns she is pregnant before high school graduation, she turns to Rose for guidance. Hope’s circumstances along with Jonathan and Samantha’s journey to find meaning in times of struggle leave Rose wondering how she can best be a source of support. Rose will have to believe in the power of family and friendship and the wonder that can be found in the eyes and the smiles.

From the Dust Jacket: Have you ever told a harmless untruth for no apparent reason? If so, you are well on your way to tackling the fine art of fabrication, a form of mental therapy originated by Cletus Hayworth, the young and somewhat eccentric social worker who is the hero of this alluring novel. Cletus defines a “fabrication” as a seemingly plausible story told as if it were true, which is not hurtful to others, and which would be of no particular significance even if it were true.

In his more optimistic moments Cletus views the practice of fabrication as the inevitable replacement for the outdated teachings of Freud. Through fabrication, one learns to distinguish what is important from what is not. As Cletus says, “If my theory is correct, after a while you’ll find it impossible to be anything but honest with yourself. To yourself, you will always know a lie from a fabrication. No more simply conforming, role playing, doing anything without knowing why you’re doing it.”

Where does all this get Cletus? For one thing, it gets him a job as a social worker, deftly fabricating his way around the pointed questions of his supervisor. It keeps him poor when he could be claiming a large inheritance. Barely on speaking terms with his brothers and sister. Shunned by his psychiatrist. And, best of all, fabrication gets him secret custody of an irresistible six-year-old boy who thinks Cletus is his father.

The Fabricator is a joyous, mirthful, warming novel, light and not so light, about Cletus’s search for the boy’s mother, whom he doesn’t know, and whom the boy doesn’t remember, who had fought bitterly though in vain to keep her son. This is a gentle story that goes down easy, with a feeling similar to that of A Thousand Clowns, of a young man who found himself, a young woman who found herself, and a boy who found them both.

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About the Author: Hollis Hodges was born a long time ago in Terre Haute, Indiana.

During World War II he served in India and China. Later he spent nine years with the State Department and the U.S. Information Agency in Washington, D.C. In between he graduated from Columbia College in New York City. Interspersed with frequent periods of unemployment, he has held a wide assortment of menial jobs. For the last dozen years he has worked mostly as a social worker.

His hobbies are tennis, chess, and scuba diving.

He is known for his good looks, wealth, sobriety, self-discipline, and rigid insistence upon always telling the absolute truth.

He has two grown children and lives in Lenox, Massachusetts, alone except for a pair of pedigreed Doberman pinschers.

He considers The Fabricator his best novel so far.

In Falkner Shelley once again emphasizes a father-daughter relationship, this time between an orphaned girl, Elizabeth Raby, and her rakish, Byronic guardian, Falkner. Haunted by a dark and mysterious past, Falkner is horrified to find that Elizabeth loves Gerard Neville, the son of the woman he once destroyed. The descriptions of Falkner’s guilt and the psychological tortures he inflicts upon himself and his daughter make the novel one of Shelley’s best works. Elizabeth, caught between her lover’s desire for revenge and her adoptive father’s secret obsession, becomes the link which ultimately enables all to live in domestic peace. Falkner is an appropriate finale to Mary Shelley’s novel writing as it encapsulates many of her concerns and uses her greatest novelistic strengths—the portrayal of an agonized hero struggling with himself, the conflicts created by love and domestic duty, the problem of the absent mother, the concept of fate and victimization, the Gothic terror of the unknown—elements she had dexterously manipulated and precociously displayed in the writing of Frankenstein nineteen years earlier.

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About the Author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) was the only child of the famous radicals, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. In 1814 she eloped with, and later married, Percy Bysshe Shelley. After his death in 1822 she returned to London where she pursued a professional writing career. Her most famous work is Frankenstein (1818), but she was author also of six other novels: Matilda (1819), Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). She also wrote for various magazines and journals (including the Westminster Review and the London Magazine). She wrote two works of travel-writing—History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817) and Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the single most widely read work of the English Romantic period, yet the author’s other works—including five novels, two travel books, essays, and reviews—remain relatively unknown. Well received in their own era, they gained for Mary Shelley the reputation of an important, imaginative, and at times, controversial, author.

From the Dust Jacket: In this stunning debut novel, a Kenyan expat is living the American Dream with her husband and adopted son soon finds it marred by child trafficking, scandal, and a problematic past.

Mugure and Zack seem to have the picture-perfect family: a young, healthy son, a beautiful home in Riverdale, New York, and a bright future. But one night, as Mugure is rummaging through an old drawer, she comes across a piece of paper with a note scrawled on it—a note that calls into question everything she’s ever believed about her husband...

A wandering curiosity may have gotten the best of Mugure this time as she heads down a dangerous road that takes her back to Kenya, where new discoveries threaten to undo her idyllic life. She wonders if she ever really knew the man she married and begins to piece together the signs that were there since the beginning. Who was that suspicious man who trailed Zack and Mugure on their first date at a New York nightclub? What about the closing of the agency that facilitated the adoption of their son?

The Fall of Saints tackles real-life political and ethical issues through a striking, beautifully rendered story. This extraordinary novel will tug at your heart and keep it racing until the end.

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About the Author: Wanjikũ wa Ngũgĩ is a writer, political analyst, and director of the Helsinki African Film Festival (HAFF) in Finland. She is also a member of the editorial board of Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society. For the past three years she was a columnist for the Finnish NGO magazine Maailman Kuvalehti, writing about political and cultural issues. Her work has been published in the Herald (Zimbabwe), the Daily Nation, Business Daily, Pambazuka News, and Chimurenga, among others.

Martin was only seven years old when he arrived in Canada in 1892, with a contingent of young British orphans. Not only did the young boy just lose his father, but this death had brought about the dismantling of his whole family and, when he emigrated to another country, this enhanced his feeling of being a bird “fallen from the nest.” His adoptive parents, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Vézina of Ste Geneviève de Batiscan were warm-hearted, and they did all they could to recreate for him a happy home, which greatly helped the young immigrant to slip into his new life. But, so many obstacles strew his path! First, he had to learn French and then be accepted by his schoolmates, some of whom considered the arrival of this newcomer as a threat. And this was just the beginning!

Chris Squires is a confused man, constantly seeking a hero father-figure. The British baby boomer is surprised to find he has a connection with Fritz, an orphaned German boy, who was found dead in the back of General Patton’s Cadillac at the end of World War Two. Chris discovers the link through Jimmy Lucas, a GI veteran, who he believes could be his father. But his surprise turns to horror when he learns that Jimmy was involved in the death of both Patton and the boy. A confrontation creates further tragedy for Chris, for Jimmy, and for Walt—the man who had saved Jimmy’s life! Chris panics and retreats back to Britain, trying to forget the incident he caused in San Francisco. Although appearing to lead a mundane and respectable life, for years he is tormented by guilt. He still hopes to find his hero, a guide to some kind of inner peace. And then Walt re-enters his life!