Concluding the trilogy that started with the bestselling memoir First They Killed My Father, Loung Ung describes her college experience and her first steps into adulthood, revealing her struggle to reconcile with her past while moving forward towards happiness. After the violence of the Khmer Rouge and the difficult assimilation experience of a refugee, Loung’s daily struggle to keep darkness, anger, and depression at bay will finally find two unexpected allies: the empowering call of activism, and the redemptive power of love. Lulu in the Sky is the story of Loung’s journey to a Cambodian village to reconnect with her mother’s spirit;
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Priscilla Gilman, a teacher of romantic poetry who embraced Wordsworth’s vision of childhood’s spontaneous wonder, eagerly anticipated the birth of her first child, certain that he would come “trailing clouds of glory.” But as Benjamin grew, his remarkable precocity was associated with a developmental disorder that would dramatically alter the course of Priscilla’s dreams.
In The Anti-Romantic Child, a memoir full of lyricism and light, Gilman explores our hopes and expectations for our children, our families, and ourselves—and the ways in which experience may lead us to re-imagine them. Using literature as a touchstone, Gilman reveals her journey through crisis to joy,
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At an intimate, festive dinner party in Seattle, six women gather to celebrate their friend Kate’s recovery from cancer. Wineglass in hand, Kate strikes a bargain with them. To celebrate her new lease on life, she’ll do the one thing that’s always terrified her: white-water rafting. But if she goes, all of them will also do something they always swore they’d never do-and Kate is going to choose their adventures.
Shimmering with warmth, wit, and insight, Joy for Beginners is a celebration of life: unexpected, lyrical, and deeply satisfying.
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After his mother’s death, Richard, a newly remarried hospital consultant, decides to build bridges with his estranged sister, Angela, inviting her and her family for a week in a rented house on the Welsh border. Four adults and four children, a single family and all of them strangers. Seven days of shared meals, log fires, card games and wet walks. But in the quiet and stillness of the valley, ghosts begin to rise up. The parents Richard thought he had; the parents Angela thought she had. Past and present lovers. Friends, enemies, victims, saviors. And from high on the dark hill,
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When the last thing you want is the one thing you need, you’ve got to have a little faith…
Growing up, Ellen Carlisle was a Christian: she went to Jesus camp, downed stale Nilla wafers at Sunday school, and never, ever played with Ouija boards. Now, years later, when infertility prevents her from giving her ambitious attorney husband a family, she finds herself on the brink of divorce, unemployed, and living with her right-wing, Born-Again-Christian parents in her suburban New Jersey hometown. There the schools are private, the past is public, and blessings come in lump sums.
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Logan Pyle, a lapsed grad student and stay-at-home dad, is just barely holding it together: His father has died, his wife Julie is distant, and his four-year-old son has gone back to drinking from a baby bottle. One Sunday morning at a children’s birthday party, he finds Julie kissing another man, and something snaps. Logan packs a bag, buckles his son into his car seat, and heads north with a 1920s Louisville Slugger in the back of his truck, a maxed-out American Express card in his wallet, and revenge in his heart. After some bad decisions and worse luck, he lands at his father’s old A-frame cabin,
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