Arno Geiger’s father was never an easy man to know. Born into a farming family in Austria and conscripted into World War Two as a seventeen-year-old “schoolboy soldier,” he later rarely, if ever, spoke to his family of his childhood, his time as a POW, or the past in general. When he started to change, Arno assumed it was the understandable effects of aging and the breakup of a thirty-year marriage. But it turned out to be more than that.
As Arno Geiger writes in this heartbreaking and insightful memoir of his father’s later years, “Alzheimer’s is an illness that,
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What to Do When I’m Gone is the illustrated instruction manual for getting through life without one’s mom. This guide of step-by-step instructions was written by Suzy Hopkins for her daughter, illustrator Hallie Bateman. Combining Hopkins’s wit and heartfelt advice with Bateman’s quirky and colorful illustrations, it’s also a poignant look at loss, love, and taking things one moment at a time. By turns whimsical, funny, touching, and above all pragmatic, it will leave readers laughing and teary-eyed. And it will spur conversations that enrich family members’ understanding of one another.
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From the author of the USA TODAY bestseller The Hideaway comes a new story about families and mending the past.
Betsy and Ty Franklin, owners of Franklin Dairy Farm in southern Alabama, have long since buried their desire for children of their own. While Ty manages their herd of dairy cows, Betsy busies herself with the farm’s day-to-day operations and tries to forget her dream of motherhood. But when her free-spirited sister, Jenna, drops off her two young daughters for “just two weeks,” Betsy’s carefully constructed wall of self-protection begins to crumble.
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An expert’s rich exploration of the intense, complicated landscape of women’s friendships.
“Do I have enough friends?” “Why did my friendship end?” and “What makes a good friendship work?”
These are questions that F. Diane Barth, a psychotherapist widely recognized for her expertise in women’s relationships, fields all the time. In I Know How You Feel, she draws out engaging stories from a lively and diverse cast of women, many of whom speak about feelings they haven’t shared before. She explores how life changes affect women’s friendships in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
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The Italian Party by Christina Lynch is a delicious and sharply funny page-turner about “innocent” Americans abroad in 1950s Siena.
Newly married, Scottie and Michael are seduced by Tuscany’s famous beauty. But the secrets they are keeping from each other force them beneath the splendid surface to a more complex view of ltaly, America and each other.
When Scottie’s Italian teacher—a teenager with secrets of his own—disappears, her search for him leads her to discover other, darker truths about herself, her husband and her country. Michael’s dedication to saving the world from communism crumbles as he begins to see that he is a pawn in a much different game.
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Ruth’s tribe are her lively children and her filmmaker and author husband Simon Fitzmaurice who has ALS and can only communicate with his eyes. Ruth’s other “tribe” are the friends who gather at the cove in Greystones, Co. Wicklow, and regularly throw themselves into the freezing cold water, just for kicks.
The Tragic Wives’ Swimming Club, as they jokingly call themselves, meet to cope with the extreme challenges life puts in their way. Swimming is just one of the daily coping strategies as Ruth fights to preserve the strong but now silent connection with her husband. As she tells the story of their marriage,
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