The book is ancient, ravaged and full of utter nonsense. But the moment it enters Daphna and Dexter’s lives, bizarre things begin to happen. Why is their father, who found the book, suddenly so distant? Is the old man who took it from him some kind of hypnotist? Why is a giant, red-eyed boy menacing them? And what does their thirteenth birthday have to do with all this?
Daphna and Dexter can’t stand each other, but they’ll have to work together to learn the truth about the Book of Nonsense—before their lives unravel completely.
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When the two-time National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene confided to friends that she and her husband planned to adopt a four-year-old boy from Bulgaria to add to their four children at home, the news threatened to place her, she writes, “among the greats: the Kennedys, the McCaughey septuplets, the von Trapp family singers, and perhaps even Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev, who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, gave birth to sixty-nine children in eighteenth-century Russia.”
Greene is best known for her books on the civil rights movement and the African HIV/AIDS pandemic.
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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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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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