Amid the turmoil of the 2008 recession that threatens her career, Lea Johnson, a behavioral researcher dedicated to curing post-traumatic stress disorder, is also struggling to save her marriage.
When her husband, Jay, is brutally attacked during an attempted robbery, Lea is shaken to realize that being an expert in fear doesn’t make her an expert in healing her own husband’s trauma.
Things take a dark turn when Jay confronts a young trespasser outside their home, only for the boy to be reported missing shortly after.
Lea begins to suspect that Jay is hiding something,
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Set during the Great Depression, The Resettlement of Vesta Blonik is the story of two strong-hearted strangers, bent but not destroyed by grief and financial destitution. Vesta Blonik, an unmarried farm woman from Minnesota and Gordon Crenshaw, confined to a North Carolina mental institution after the death of his wife and child, meet through misleading letters written by Gordon’s family members. But reality doesn’t look at all like what was promised, and when they learn the truth, the two must find a path forward, together or apart.
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In the wake of his wife’s death, Nick Nacht finds himself adrift, seeking emotional renewal among strangers in unfamiliar places.
As he navigates the challenges of grief, he encounters a tapestry of lives– an impulsive teenage girl, a married woman with a hidden agenda, a new neighbor’s pet bird, a young poet grappling with her own demons, and a woman who translates indigenous texts.
Over the course of a year, from the sunny shores of Florida to the vibrant Mediterranean, these vivid encounters push him toward a reckoning with his deep feelings of loss and abandonment.
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In November 2020, B.J. Hollars answered a call from his father-in-law while teaching. “When will you be home?” Steve asked. “I have news.” So began the Hollars family’s year of plenty—a cancer diagnosis on top of the ongoing COVID pandemic, then feelings of falling short as parents, partners, and people. While Hollars traces his family’s daily devastations alongside his father-in-law’s decline, he recounts the small mercies along the way: birthdays, campfires, fishing trips, kayaking, and fireflies. As he, his wife, Meredith, and their three young children grapple with how best to say goodbye to the person they love, they are forced to reassess their own lives.
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A heartbreakingly hilarious memoir of losing both parents to cancer and making daring choices to avoid the same early demise.
By the time she was thirty, Gila Pfeffer was the oldest living member of her family. A blood test confirmed she carried the BRCA1 gene—which put her at high risk of developing breast cancer herself. Determined to break the cycle of early death in her family, Gila decides to undergo an elective double mastectomy.
This memoir follows her path as she becomes a reluctant expert on how to sit shiva, finds love, and becomes a mother,
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Anne grew up in an abusive home, leading to severe depression and a determination to do better as a mother. One of her sons wants a dog from the time he is a baby; Anne very much does not. For years she appeases him with creatures who live in cages and tanks, but on his tenth birthday she can no longer say no—and she proceeds to fall in love with their new four-legged family member, Mattie. Then Mattie dies a sudden and tragic death, and Anne feels herself begin to sink back into depression.
Trying to cope, she immediately adopts Milo—a dog who,
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