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THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US

After Middle Eastern war correspondent Caddie Blair loses her colleague and lover in an ambush, she is devastated by grief and unmoored by the sudden loss of her journalistic detachment. Operating without her normal instinct and internal compass, Caddie becomes a member of the community, no longer an outsider, and therefore increas­ingly vulnerable and volatile, especially in the face of her growing desire for revenge. Illuminating and perceptive, The Distance Between Us is as relevant and timely as it is powerful and gripping.

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THE FIGHTER PILOT’S WIFE

At age 21, Gilberta meets and, a year and a half later, marries a dashing young Air Force fighter pilot. She leaps into the unique challenges of raising a family with lives framed by worldwide travel, military aviation, and the constant specter of combat. She learns to cope with seeing young pilots lose their lives in plane crashes, joining other wives in comforting the widows, and helping them pack up their children and leave the familial embrace of the military. Meanwhile, Gilberta strives to protect her own children from that looming unspoken fear—that their father could perish while in service as a jet pilot.

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CLOSER THAN YOU THINK

Artist Miranda Jones loves the life she’s been building in the picturesque coastal town of Milford-Haven. But while persistent dreams of a deep connection with a man haunt her, she’s unable to tell whether dashing Zack Calvin’s attentions are genuine. Sally is distracted from dishing up her home cooking by the reappearance of her high school sweetheart, Vietnam Veteran Tony Fiorentino. With the disappearance of reporter Chris Christian, Deputy Delmar Johnson digs for clues. Meanwhile the Doobie Brothers give a sold-out concert at the Central Coast Bowl against a web of complex relationships backstage, and Samantha Hugo’s private journal reveals her struggle to discover whether her long lost child is farther away than ever,

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THE MERMAID CHAIR

In her remarkable follow-up to the widely acclaimed The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd tells a beautiful and haunting story centered around forty-two-year-old Jessie Sullivan, a woman in quiet crisis whose return home to the island of a mermaid saint becomes a pilgrimage to self-awakening. In this powerful exploration of mid-life marriage and the intersection of the spiritual and the erotic in the feminine soul, Kidd illustrates the sacredness of belonging to oneself and the healing mercy of love and forgiveness. Jessie’s journey begins in the winter of 1988 when she receives an early-morning call from her mother Nelle’s close friend Kat.

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SWEETNESS IN THE BELLY

An evocative and richly imagined story of a British Muslim woman’s search for love and belonging in two very different worlds.

When Lilly is eight years old, her pot-smoking hippy British parents leave her at a Sufi shrine in Morocco and inform her they will be back to collect her in three days. Three weeks later, she learns they’ve been murdered. Lilly fills that haunted hollow in her life with the intense study and memorization of the Qur’an under the patient care of the Sufi saint’s disciple she was entrusted to. Years later, her journey from Morocco to Harar,

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THE FRIENDSHIP TEST

One late wine- and gossip-fueled night, four friends on a lark create a fateful test of friendship — one that challenges the very principles and boundaries of their alliance. To pass it means to never, at any cost, betray one another. Twenty years later, they must face that ultimate test.

We meet them at the dawn of their camaraderie in the 1980s and already each woman is distinguished from the other: Tamsin, the compassionate mother hen; Reagan, the brazen and clever overachiever; Sarah, the seemingly perfect beauty; and Freddie, who despite being far from her U.S. home, finds strength in her friends.

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