During World War I, seventeen-year-old Frieda Mintz secures a job at a Boston department store and strikes out on her own, escaping her repressive Jewish mother and marriage to a wealthy widower twice her age. Determined to find love on her own terms, she is intoxicated by her newfound freedom and the patriotic fervor of the day. That is, until a soldier reports her as his last sexual contact, sweeping her up in the government’s wartime crusade against venereal disease. Quarantined in a detention center, Frieda finds in the Home’s confines a group of brash, unforgettable women who help her see the way to a new kind of independence.
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In this 17th century novel of Julia Older’s Isles of Shoals Trilogy, young Thom Taylor is cast onto the lawless Isles off the New England coast. He falls hopelessly in love with Master Babb’s saucy Barbadoes servant Pru. Just when he gains his freedom, Thom is sent on a forced march, survives an Indian massacre, stands trial with a witch, and escapes pirates Quelch and Kidd. Outwitting mutinous sailors hunting for gold, he returns to the Shoals and Pru. Thom’s determined struggles bring him independence, prosperity and the family he yearns for as he and adolescent America come of age.
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In Stefan Merrill Block’s extraordinary debut, three narratives intertwine to create a story that is by turns funny, smart, introspective, and revelatory.
Abel Haggard is an elderly hunchback who haunts the remnants of his family’s farm in the encroaching shadow of the Dallas suburbs, adrift in recollections of those he loved and lost long ago. As a young man, he believed himself to be “the one person too many”; now he is all that remains. Hundreds of miles to the south, in Austin, Seth Waller is a teenage “Master of Nothingness”–a prime specimen of that gangly,
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Girls of Riyadh was released in Lebanon in Arabic in September 2005. The novel, recounting forbidden details about the private lives of four young women from Saudi Arabia’s upper classes, immediately became a sensation all over the Arab world. Hundreds of articles were written about it, politicians and pundits debated it publicly, online chat rooms were crowded with people hotly discussing it, and it sold more than a hundred thousand copies in the first several months—not including the countless black-market editions that were circulating in Saudi Arabia, where it was banned. The author, a twenty-four-year-old Saudi Arabian woman,
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For forty-one years, Samson Brown has been caring for Hannah, the lone elephant at the down-at-heel Max L. Biedelman Zoo. Having vowed not to retire until an equally loving and devoted caretaker is found to replace him, Sam rejoices when smart, compassionate Neva Wilson is hired as the new elephant keeper. But Neva quickly discovers what Sam already knows: that despite their loving care, Hannah is isolated from other elephants, and her feet are nearly ruined from standing on hard concrete all day. Using her contacts in the zookeeping world, Neva and Sam hatch a plan to send Hannah to an elephant sanctuary—just as the zoo’s angry,
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As a retired Episcopal priest, Father Tim Kavanagh is well aware of the power of words. Words of comfort. Words of Scripture. Words of encouragement. But it only takes two simple words to inspire him to make one of the most important journeys of his life, and those words are: “Come home.”
And so he does. Traveling to his boyhood home in northern Mississippi doesn’t merely take Father Tim across hundreds of miles. Thanks to a thousand sights and smells, he also travels back through memories—some fond and some he’s tried for nearly forty years to forget.
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