Jacqueline Novogratz left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty and find powerful new ways of tackling it. From her first stumbling efforts as a young idealist venturing forth in Africa to the creation of the trailblazing organization she runs today, Novogratz tells gripping stories with unforgettable characters. She shows, in ways both hilarious and heartbreaking, how traditional charity often fails, but how a new form of philanthropic investing called patient capital can help make people self-sufficient and can change millions of lives. More than just an autobiography or a how-to guide to addressing poverty,
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Dorothea Benton Frank returns to the enchanted landscape of South Carolina’s Lowcountry made famous in her beloved New York Times bestseller Sullivans Island to tell the story of the next generation of Hamiltons and Hayes.
Whether you were away from the Lowcountry for a week or for years, it was impossible to remember how gorgeous it was. It never changed and everyone depended on that.
Newly graduated from college and an aspiring writer, Beth Hayes craves independence and has a world to conquer. But her notions of travel, graduate study, and writing the great American novel will have to be postponed.
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Author Cassandra Fallows believes she may have found the story that could become her next bestseller. When she was a girl growing up in a racially diverse middle-class neighborhood in Baltimore, a shy, quiet, unobtrusive child named Calliope Jenkins orbited Cassandra’s circle of friends. Later Calliope would be accused of an unspeakable crime and would spend seven years in prison for refusing to speak about it. But by delving too deeply into Calliope’s dark secrets, Cassandra may inadvertently unearth a few of her own—forcing her to reexamine the memories she holds most precious, as the stark light of truth illuminates a mother’s pain,
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In a rehabilitation center for torture victims in Copenhagen, Thorkild Kristensen is trying to take his patient, Bernardo Greene, into the darkest corners of his memory. Nardo is a survivor of months of torture in a Chilean prison, brutally punished for no crime other than sharing political poetry with his students. One vision kept Nardo alive during his imprisonment: he was visited by two angels who promised him that he would see the light of day again. Nardo has seen no angels since that dark day—until he sets eyes upon Michela Ibsen, a Danish woman with radiant blue eyes who frequents the same café as Nardo.
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In her latest stories, Antonya Nelson sets her characters in the middle of the country, at the edge of reason. In the title story, a depressed mother follows her delinquent son from juvenile court to the maternity ward, shocked when teenage fatherhood turns his life around. In “Party of One,” a woman tries to protect her suicidal sister from a painful breakup, while hiding a dark secret of her own. “Falsetto” also features a protective sister, who learns a lot from her adolescent brother in the wake of a tragic accident. In “People People,” a married woman discovers her own insecurities while trying to shelter her obese,
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“I need you to understand how ordinary it all was. . . .”
In the turbulent southern summer of 1963, Millwood’s white population steers clear of “Shake Rag,” the black section of town. Young Florence Forrest is one of the few who crosses the line. The daughter of a burial insurance salesman with dark secrets and the town’s “cake lady,” whose backcountry bootleg runs lead further and further away from a brutal marriage, Florence attaches herself to her grandparents’ longtime maid, Zenie Johnson. Named for Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, Zenie treats the unwanted girl as just another chore,
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