Perhaps it was because she was pregnant and hormones had eaten her brain that Judith O’Reilly was persuaded by her husband to leave London for the northern wilds. But pregnancy hadn’t addled her enough not to have a back-up plan: if life in the country didn’t measure up, the family would return to the city.
Far from home, Judith, a journalist and mother of three young children, discovers just how tough an assignment making a new life is. In the heart of the country, with no decent coffee in sight, Judith swaps high heels for rubber boots and media-darlings for evangelical strangers and farmers’
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When Susan Richards adopted an abused horse rescued by the local SPCA she didn’t know how Lay Me Down’s loving nature would touch her heart—and change her life.
Susan, a writing teacher, had lost her mother at the age of five and been abandoned by her father to uncaring relatives; she had an unhappy marriage ending in divorce and had self-medicated for anxiety (and grief and repressed anger) with alcohol. For more than a decade she had aspired to be a published writer but it was only with the memoir she wrote to honor Lay Me Down that she achieved this goal.
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Infused with captivating images of a Neapolitan boyhood and a career devoted to the incomparable wonders of Italian wine, Passion on the Vine is an enchanting love letter to a singular destination, written not by an outsider but by one of its most devoted sons. This is the story of a boy who grew up relishing the fresh ingredients of his family’s table and was given thimblefuls of Sangiovese mixed with water. Herbs, cheeses, wild game, and vegetables were all available from local vendors and cooked with a reverence for fresh flavors. When he emigrated to New York with his family,
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Carolyn Jourdan, an attorney on Capitol Hill, thought she had it made. But when her mother has a heart attack, she returns home—to the Tennessee mountains, where her father is a country doctor and her mother works as his receptionist. Jourdan offers to fill in for her mother until she gets better. But days turn into weeks as she trades her suits for scrubs. Most important, though, she comes to understand what her caring and patient father means to her close-knit community. With great humor and great tenderness, Heart in the Right Place shows that some of our biggest heroes are the ones living right beside us.
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In Live Boldly, Mary Anne Radmacher identifies an assortment of qualities for our life’s journey and defines each as it relates to laughing loudly, loving truly, playing often, working smart, and sharing your heart. Each definition is followed by a quote, a poem, an aphorism that explores the quality. Stories culled from Mary Anne’s own life and teaching practice followed by an invitation to the reader to listen more closely to their lives, to give themselves what they need and to step back into their daily lives, knowing they can choose, in that moment, to live boldly by their own definition.
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Topping the best-seller charts in Britain and published to much acclaim in the United States, The Perfect Summer chronicles a glorious English summer a century ago when the world was on the cusp of irrevocable change. That summer of 1911 a new king was crowned and the aristocracy was at play, bounding from one house party to the next. To a charity ball where the other girls came dressed as virginal white swans, the striking debutante Lady Diana Manners made a late appearance as a black swan. The Ballets Russes arrived in London for the first time and people swarmed to Covent Garden to see Nijinsky’s gravity-defying leaps.
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