Set during the harrowing years after Prohibition and in the midst of the Great Depression, this is a spectacular southern gothic tale by author James Markert. With piercing, evocative prose, Markert tells the story of the McFee family, owners of the once-legendary Old Sam McFee bourbon distillery and de facto royalty of the small Kentucky town of Twisted Tree. In the wake of Prohibition and personal tragedy, their empire is now a crumbling reminder of what was once great and now the blurring lines of good and evil and a curious blend of miracles and memories have taken hold. When a mysterious drifter arrives and an unexplained miracle occurs,
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Baby Boomers married for more than 30 years dare more than the ordinary by walking away from their comfortable life to take a mid-life gap year abroad. Marianne and Joe Bohr jump off the proverbial cliff to follow a travel dream: they unload their house, sell the cars, quit their jobs and say goodbye to the US in search of adventure. They start and end their journey in France and travel through an additional 20 countries in-between.
Gap Year Girl recounts details of their longing to get the trip underway during the year prior to departure and the experiences,
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Montpelier Parade is just across town, but to Sonny it might as well be a different world. Working with his father in the garden of one of its handsome homes one Saturday, he sees a back door easing open and a beautiful woman coming down the path toward him. This is Vera, the sort of person who seems destined to remain forever out of his reach.
Hoping to cast off his loneliness and a restless sense of not belonging—at high school, in his part-time job at the butcher shop, and in the increasingly suffocating company of his own family—Sonny drifts into dreams of a different kind of life.
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Like Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Brian Doyle’s stunning fiction debut brings a town to life through the jumbled lives and braided stories of its people.
In a small fictional town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. There’s a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow,
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My name is Calvin Sinclair, I’m eleven years old and I have a confession…I killed my brother. It’s the summer before grade six and Calvin Sinclair is bored to tears. He’s recently moved from a big city to a small town and there’s nothing to do. It’s hot, he has no friends and the only kid around is his six-year-old brother, Sammy, who can barely throw a basketball as high as the hoop. Cal occupies his time by getting his brother to do almost anything: from collecting ants to doing Calvin’s chores. And Sammy is all too eager – as long as it means getting a “Level”
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Adam wants nothing more than to be a “normal” teen, but his reality is quickly leaking normal. Afraid to sleep because of the monster that stalks his dreams, Adam’s breakdown at school in front of his crush Sarah lands him in the hospital.
As he struggles to cope with his day-to-day life, Adam can only vaguely comprehend some sort of future. His mother died when he was only four and his eccentric father—who might be an assassin, a voodoo god, the reincarnation of the Buddha, or something even stranger—is never available when Adam really needs him. Even his paranoid grandfather,
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