Author: nstewart

9 Self-Help Books to Check out this August

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 In The Plus, Greg teaches you how to brainwash yourself into better behavior, retaining the pluses in your life and eliminating the minuses. His approach to self-help is simple, and perfect for cynics; it’s not about positive thinking in the short term, it’s about positive being in the long term. In The Plus, Greg shows how skeptics too can advance themselves for the betterment of their lives and the healing of their communities.

Every day, we’re bombarded with pressure to be positive. We’re constantly told that the key to happiness is silencing negativity wherever it crops up. In this refreshingly honest guide, sought-after therapist Whitney Goodman shares the latest research along with everyday examples and client stories that reveal how damaging toxic positivity is to ourselves and our relationships, and presents simple ways to experience and work through difficult emotions.

Any given day brings a never-ending list. There’s the work thing, the laundry thing, the creative thing, the exercise thing, the family thing, the thing we don’t want to do, and the thing we’ve been putting off. After years of searching for the secret to productivity, Madeleine Dore discovered there isn’t one. I Didn’t Do the Thing Today is the call to dismantle our comparisons to others, aspirational routines, and the unrealistic notions of what can be done in a day.

Celebrated self-care storyteller Alexandra Elle delivers 15 lessons on how to overcome obstacles, build confidence, and cultivate abundance in her part memoir and part guide, After the Rain. This soulful collection is filled with illuminating reflections on loss, fear, bravery, healing, love and acceptance. Readers follow along her journey as she transforms challenging experiences into fuel for her career as a successful entrepreneur and author.

Dr. Ashton becomes both researcher and subject as she focuses on twelve separate challenges. Beginning with a new area of focus each month, she guides you through the struggles she faces, the benefits she experiences, and the science behind why each month’s challenge–giving up alcohol, doing more push-ups, adopting an earlier bedtime, limiting technology–can lead to better health.

In Joyful, designer Ingrid Fetell Lee explores how the seemingly mundane spaces and objects we interact with every day have surprising and powerful effects on our mood. Drawing on insights from neuroscience and psychology, she explains why one setting makes us feel anxious or competitive, while another fosters acceptance and delight–and, most importantly, she reveals how we can harness the power of our surroundings to live fuller, healthier, and truly joyful lives.

Sisters Emily Nagoski, Ph.D., and Amelia Nagoski, DMA, are here to help end the cycle of overwhelm and exhaustion, and confront the obstacles that stand between women and well-being. With insights from the latest science, prescriptive advice, and helpful worksheets and exercises, Burnout reveals what you can do to complete the biological stress cycle and return your body to a state of relaxation.

This isn’t a book about high-fiving everyone else in your life. You’re already doing that. Cheering for your favorite teams. Celebrating your friends. Supporting the people you love as they go after what they want in life. Imagine if you gave that same love and encouragement to yourself. You’d be unstoppable. In this book, Mel teaches you how to start high-fiving the most important person in your life, the one who is staring back at you in the mirror: Yourself.

How much room are you giving to shame, to regret, to being against yourself? Whatever it is, it’s too much. Life is too short for you to live bitter and discouraged, letting your circumstances hold you back. Every morning you have to empty out anything negative from the day before and put on a fresh new attitude. Power up and get your mind going in the right direction, and you’ll step into all the new things God has in store for you.

Summer Isn’t Over Just Yet: Check out these end of summer fiction reads on the Libby App

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They call themselves the May Mothers—a group of new moms whose babies were born in the same month. Twice a week, they get together for some much needed adult time. But when the women go out for drinks on this hot Fourth of July night, something goes terrifyingly wrong. One of the babies is taken from his crib. Now he is missing. What follows is a heart-pounding race to find the baby boy, during which secrets are exposed, and friendships are destroyed.

This is the story of a love affair that begins on the coast of Italy in 1962 when a young innkeeper meets an American starlet, who he soon learns is dying. The story begins again when an elderly Italian man shows up on the set of a movie studio searching for a mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier. From the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to the back lots of contemporary Hollywood, this is a dazzling, yet deeply human roller coaster of a novel.

A terrible constructions site accident takes Edgar Freemantle’s right arm and scrambles his memory and his mind, leaving him with little but rage as he begins the ordeal of rehabilitation. Trying to get away, Edgar leaves his home and rents a house on Duma Key, off the coast of Florida. He draws and paints feverishly, but it isn’t until he meets elderly woman, Elizabeth, that he realizes the power that his paintings have, and the damage they are truly capable of.

Little River, New York, 1994: April Sawicki is living in a motorhome that he father won in a poker game. She’s failing out of school, and left fending for herself in a town where she’s never felt at home. After a fight with her dad, April packs her stuff and ends up in Ithaca. She finds a kindred sense of belonging, and as April moves through the world, meeting people who make her feel at home, she discovers that where she came from doesn’t dictate who she has to be.

Two truths and a lie. Emma and her friends played it all the time at Camp Nightingale. But the games ended the night that Emma watched the others sneak out into the darkness. That was the last time they were seen. Fifteen years later, Emma is a rising painting star, and the wealthy owner of Camp Nightingale asks Emma to return as a painting instructor. Emma agrees, and tries to find out what happened to her friends, but her closure could come at a deadly price.

Adrift in a raft after a deadly ship explosion, ten people struggle for survival at sea. Three days pass. Short on water, food and hope, they spot a man floating in the waves. They pull him in. “Thank the Lord we found you,” a passenger says. “I am the Lord,” the man whispers. Is this man who he claims to be? It falls to the island’s chief inspector to solve the mystery of what happened when the empty life raft, and a notebook, washes up on the island of Montserrat.

Roya finds literary oasis in Mr. Fakhri’s stationary shop. With a keen instinct for budding romance, Mr. Fakhri introduces Roya to Bahman. Their romance blossoms, but on the eve of their marriage, Roya is left waiting in the town square for Bahman. Roya tries desperately to contact Bahman, but her efforts are fruitless. With a sorrowful heart she moves on, but more than sixty years later, fate leads her back to Bahman and offers her a chance to ask him questions that have haunted her for more than half a century.

Harmony Resort promises hope for struggling marriages. Johanna and Ben have a marriage that looks perfect on the surface, but in reality they don’t know each other at all. Shell and Colin fight constantly, but what has really torn them apart is too devastating to talk about. When both couples begin Harmony’s intensive program, it becomes clear that Harmony is not all it seems. As a deadly storm descends the coast, not one person will remain unchanged by what follows.

One December evening, Autumn Spencer’s twin sister, Summer, walks to the roof of their home and is never seen again. Faced with authorities indifferent to another missing woman, Autumn must pursue answers on her own, all while grieving her mother’s recent death. Autumn pretends to hold up through the crisis, but after starting an affair with Summer’s boyfriend, she begins to unravel, becoming obsessed with murdered women and the men who kill them.

Get Ready to Laugh at these Comedies Lost in the Stacks

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Inside an apartment open house, a failed bank robber has taken a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple, a wealthy bank director, a young couple, an eighty-seven-year-old woman, a real estate agent, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment’s only bathroom. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of them—the bank robber included—desperately crave some sort of rescue.

Finding inspiration in questions from the nature of perfection to the icing on carrot cake, One More Thing has at its heart the most human of phenomena: love, fear, hope, ambition, and the inner stirring for the one elusive element just that might make a person complete. Across a dazzling range of subjects, themes, tones, and narrative voices, the many pieces in this collection are like nothing else, but they have one thing in common: they share the playful humor.

Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow. Yet, despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor’s dog and uncovers a secret about his mother.

Whether Samantha Irby is talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making “adult” budgets; explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette; detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes; or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies; she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing emotional truths.

When Meddelin Chan ends up accidentally killing her blind date, her mother calls for her aunties to help get rid of the body. Unfortunately, a dead body proves to be a lot more challenging to dispose of than one might anticipate, especially when it is inadvertently shipped in a cake cooler to the billionaire wedding Meddy, her Ma, and aunties are working at. It’s the biggest job yet for the family wedding business and nothing, not even an unsavory corpse, will get in the way of her auntie’s perfect buttercream flowers.

Me Talk Pretty One Day narrates David Sedaris’ move to Paris from New York with hysterical stories about his struggle to learn French, along with ridiculous passages about his crazy family members like his brother, who speaks in constant hip-hop slang to his clueless father. And no one hones a finer fury in response to such modern annoyances as restaurant meals presented in ludicrous towers of food and cashiers with six-inch fingernails.

When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in her life, and we are all better for it. For every intellectual misfit who through they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a look at all the dark, yet wonderful moments of our lives.

When Kate Campbell’s life in Manhattan suddenly implodes, she is forced to return to Sea Point, where she grew up. Meanwhile, Miles Hoffman has also returned home to prove to his mother that he’s capable of taking over the family business. Kate and Miles converge in Sea Point as the town faces an identity crisis. Full of heart and humor-and laced with biting wit, Rock the Boat proves that even when you know all the back roads, there aren’t any shortcuts to growing up.

When Mackenzie, Sunna, and Maude move into a rental house, they are strangers with only one thing in common–important people in their lives have “ghosted” them. Mackenzie’s sister, Sunna’s best friend, and Maude’s fiancé–all gone with no explanation. But the more they learn about each other, the more questions they begin to have. And creepy sounds and strange happenings on the property suggest that the ghosts from their pasts might not be all that’s haunting them.

Nebraska Stories Lost in the Stacks

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At the age of 17, Randall Hunsacker shoots his mother’s boyfriend, steals a car and comes close to killing himself. His second chance lies in a small Nebraska farm town, where the landmarks include McKibben’s Mobil Station, Frmka’s Superette, and a sign that says The Wages of Sin is Hell. This is Goodnight, a place so ingrown and provincial that Randall calls it “Sludgeville”-until he starts thinking of it as home.

After the death of his parents, Jim Burden is sent to live with his grandparents on the Nebraska plains. On that same train is Ántonia, his soon to be neighbor and lifelong friend. Her family has emigrated from Bohemia to start a new life but soon lose their money and must work hard just to survive. Through it all, Ántonia retains her natural pride and free spirit. In My Ántonia, Willa Cather paints a rich picture of life on the prairie at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In 1973 the small southwest Nebraska railroad town of McCook became the unlikely scene of a grisly murder. More than forty years later, author James W. Hewitt returns to the scene and unearths new details about what happened. Hewitt takes readers through the evidence, including salacious details of sex and intrigue between the Hoyts and the Nokeses, and draws new conclusions about what really happened between the two families on that fateful September night.

Burt and Vicky, a couple trying to save their marriage, are driving to California for a vacation and to visit Vicky’s brother. Driving through the cornfields in rural Nebraska, they accidentally run over a young boy—only to discover that he was already hurt and they may not be responsible for his death. They decide to report the incident to the police and go to the nearest two to look for help. Out in the corn, something is watching them, and help is nowhere to be found.

During the war, American soldiers rolled through North Platte on troop trains. The town transformed its railroad depot into the North Platte Canteen –a place where soldiers could enjoy coffee, music, and home-cooked food. In this heartwarming eyewitness history, based on interviews with North Platte residents and the GIs who passed through, Bob Greene unearths and reveals a classic American story of a grateful country honoring its brave and dedicated sons.

In the wake of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt called for the largest arms buildup in our nation’s history. A shortage of steel, however, quickly slowed the program’s momentum, and arms production fell dangerously behind schedule. Henry Doorly, publisher of the Omaha World-Herald, had the solution. Prairie Forge tells the story of the great Nebraska scrap drive of 1942—a campaign that swept the nation and yielded five million tons of scrap metal.

Ten years after the Seventh Cavalry massacred more than two hundred Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, J.B. Bennett, a white rancher, and Star, a young Native American woman, are murdered in a remote meadow on J.B.’s land. The deaths bring together the scattered members of the Bennett family and as the mystery of these twin deaths unfolds, the history of the dysfunctional Bennetts and their damning secrets is revealed.

Matthew Worth is a mess. Somewhere between a good cop and a bad screwup, he botched a marriage and a career. Busted to night patrol at a robbery-prone Omaha supermarket, Worth is doing time, wearing his uniform and asking shoppers if they want paper or plastic. If that isn’t enough, he suspects he might be falling for Gwen, the shy checkout girl who may be an even bigger mess than he is. It couldn’t get any worse. Until it does.

In June, 1954, Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska from the work farmwhere he has just served a year for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, and the family farm foreclosed upon, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his brother and start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden in the trunk of the car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future.

A Man’s Best Friend: Stories about our Furry Friends Lost in the Stacks

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Born mute, speaking only in sign, Edgar Sawtelle leads an idyllic life with his parents on their farm in remote northern Wisconsin. For generations, the Sawtelles have raised and trained dogs. But with the unexpected return of Claude, Edgar’s paternal uncle, turmoil consumes the Sawtelles’ once peaceful home. Forced to flee into the vast wilderness, Edgar comes of age in the wild, fighting for his survival and that of the three dogs who follow him.

Enzo knows he is different from other dogs: a philosopher with a nearly human soul, he has educated himself by watching television extensively, and by listening very closely to his master, Denny Swift, a race car driver. Through Denny, Enzo has gained tremendous insight into the human condition, and he sees that life, like racing, isn’t simply about going fast. On the eve of his death, Enzo takes stock of his life, recalling all that he and his family have been through.

Off the Leash is a group portrait of dog people, specifically the strange, wonderful, neurotic, and eccentric dog people who gather at Amory Park, overlooking Boston near Fenway Park. And it’s about author Matthew Gilbert’s transformation, after much fear and loathing of dogs and social groups, into one of those dog people with fur on their jackets, squeaky toys in their hands, and biscuits in their pockets.

In 2002, Larry Levin and his twin sons, Dan and Noah, took their terminally ill cat to the Ardmore Animal Hospital outside Philadelphia to have the beloved pet put to sleep. What would begin as a terrible day suddenly got brighter as the ugliest dog they had ever seen ran up to them. The dog had been used as bait for fighting dogs when he was just a few months old. The Levins were unable to resist Oogy’s charms, and decided to take him home.

Ted Kerasote met and adopted Merle, a Laborador mix, while he was on a camping trip. Merle had been living in the wild, and after taking the dog home with him, Kerasote soon realized that Merle could not adjust to inhabiting in the human world. So he put a door in his house to let Merle live both outside and in. Merle showed Kerasote how dogs might live were they free; Kerasote suggests how they should be allowed to live, and the doors that should always remain open to them.

From a top secret government laboratory come two genetically altered life forms. One is a magnificent dog of astonishing intelligence. The other, a hybrid monster of a brutally violent nature. And both are on the loose. Bestselling author Dean Koontz presents his most terrifying, dramatic and moving novel: The explosive story of a man and a woman, caught in a relentless storm of mankind’s darkest creation.

My name’s Griz. My childhood wasn’t like yours. I’ve never had friends, and in my whole life I’ve not met enough people to play a game of football. My parents told me how crowded the world used to be, but we were never lonely on our remote island. We had each other, and our dogs. Then the thief came. There may be no law left except what you make of it. But if you steal my dog, you can at least expect me to come after you.

Adam March has it all: the beautiful wife, the high-powered job, the glittering circle of friends, until one day when it all comes crashing down. He loses his job. He loses his wife. He loses the life he’s worked so hard to achieve. Adam thinks he’s lost it all, but this is when he meets Chance, a mixed breed Pit Bull. What transpires is the story of one man, one dog, and how they save each other—in ways they never could have expected.

Leigh Brill finally decided to stop pretending she was just fine when she admitted to the service dog interviewer, “I have cerebral palsy. My hands shake, too. And if I drop stuff, sometimes it’s hard to just bend down and get it.” So began her journey toward independence and confidence, all thanks to a trained companion dog named Slugger. The struggling college student and the Labrador became an instant team.

Classics You May Not Have Read Yet But Should

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Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, the novel brakes the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery.

The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years. By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the daily experiences of the unforgettable Nolan’s are raw with honesty and tenderly threaded with family connectedness.

Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new, rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left alone to raise his boys to manhood. One boy thrives, nurtured by the love of all those around him; the other grows up in loneliness, enveloped by a mysterious darkness.

Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in mental hospital with a strict routine, unopposed by her patients. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy – the fun-loving trickster who resolves to oppose her rules. His struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute patient who understands McMurphy’s heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them imprisoned.

Carrie White may be picked on by her classmates, but she has a gift. She can move things with her mind. Doors lock. Candles fall. This is her power and her problem. Then, an act of kindness, as spontaneous as the vicious taunts of her classmates, offers Carrie a chance to be a normal…until an unexpected cruelty turns her gift into a weapon of horror and destruction that no one will ever forget.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

When Lily’s fierce-hearted black “stand-in mother,” Rosaleen, insults three of the town’s most vicious racists, Lily decides they should both escape to Tiburon, South Carolina–a town that holds the secret to her mother’s past. There they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters who introduce Lily to a mesmerizing world of bees, honey, and the Black Madonna who presides over their household.

This is the story of Louis of his journey through mortal and immortal life. Louis recounts how he became a vampire at the hands of the sinister Lestat and how he became indoctrinated, unwillingly, into the vampire way of life. His story ebbs and flows through the streets of New Orleans, defining crucial moments such as his discovery of the exquisite lost young child Claudia, wanting not to hurt but to comfort her with the last breaths of humanity he has inside.

After the sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a boy named Pi, a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with the tiger, Richard Parker, for 227 days while lost at sea.

Books with a Twist that you won’t see coming

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First, there were ten–a curious assortment of strangers summoned as weekend guests to a private island off the coast of Devon. Their host, an eccentric millionaire, is nowhere to be found. All that the guests have in common is a wicked past they’re unwilling to reveal–and a secret that will seal their fate. For each has been marked for murder. Before the weekend is out, there will be none. And only the dead are above suspicion.

Aiden Bishop knows the rules. Evelyn Hardcastle will die every day until he can identify her killer and break the cycle. He has eight days, and eight different incarnations, but every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest at Blackheath Manor. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others. But he will soon learn that there are two other people competing to find out the murderer and only one person can win.

Things have been wrong with Mr. and Mrs. Wright for a long time but when they win a weekend away to Scotland, it might be just what their marriage needs. Every anniversary the couple exchange traditional gifts and each year Adam’s wife writes him a letter that she never lets him read. They both know this weekend will make or break their marriage, but they didn’t randomly win this trip. One of them is lying, and someone doesn’t want them to live happily ever after.

Anne and Marco Conti seem to have it all-a loving relationship, a wonderful home, and their beautiful baby, Cora. But one night when they are at a dinner party next door, a terrible crime is committed. Suspicion immediately falls on the parents. Detective Rasbach knows that the panicked couple is hiding something. Both Anne and Marco soon discover that the other is keeping secrets, secrets they’ve kept for years.

Shortly after her 25th birthday, Libby Jones learns that she has inherited an abandoned London mansion from her biological parents. Adopted as a baby, Libby is excited to learn about her birth family. But her family history is much more than she anticipates when she finds out her parents committed suicide as part of a cult, and her siblings vanished. As scary as that is, the truth is even darker. 

Josh Baxter, the man behind the wheel, is a virtual stranger to Charlie. They met at the campus ride board, each looking to share the long drive home to Ohio. The longer she sits in the passenger seat, however, the more Charlie notices there’s something suspicious about Josh. Trapped in a terrifying game of cat and mouse played out on pitch-black roads and in neon-lit parking lots, Charlie knows the only way to live is to survive the night.

“I need you.” Those three words send Isa Wilde running to her friend’s side. At boarding school as a teenager, Isa befriended Fatima, Thea, and Kate in a year that would change their lives. The three were inseparable and reckless, playing a game of their own making where they lied to everyone around them but not to each other. When a bone is found in the marsh, their childhood lies come back to haunt them.

During a summer party at the family farm in the English countryside, sixteen-year-old Laurel Nicolson escapes to her childhood tree house and spies a stranger coming up the long road to the farm. She watches as her mother speaks to him. Before the afternoon is over, Laurel will witness a shocking crime. Fifty years later, Laurel, now a successful London actress, returns to the farm and is overwhelmed by family secrets she had not thought of in decades.

Working as a lady’s maid in Monte Carlo, the narrator is swept off her feet by the handsome widower Maxim de Winter. After a rushed courtship and impulsive marriage, she returns as his wife to his beautiful estate, Manderley. Yet, she quickly learns she is not the true mistress of the estate, as the household will not let her forget the memory of Rebecca, de Winter’s first wife who drowned the year before.

Check out these Books before they hit the Theater

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Adapted from the short story in this collection of the same name, The Black Phone is set to be released in June. The story is one of John Finney, who is in trouble. The kidnapper locked him in the basement, a place stained with the blood of half a dozen other children. With him is an antique phone, long since disconnected, which transmits the voices of the previous victims who just might give him the means to escape.

Ben Mears has returned to Jerusalem’s Lot in the hopes that living in an old mansion, long the subject of town lore, will help him cast out his own devils and provide inspiration for his new book. But when two young boys venture into the woods and only one comes out alive, Mears begins to realize that there may be something sinister at work and that his hometown is under siege by forces of darkness far beyond his control.

The story goes on with the soon to be released adaptation of the “The Lord of the Rings” series titled “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.” Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared reemergence of evil to Middle-earth. Traveling to the furthest reaches of the map, these characters carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone.ar dapibus leo.

Frances is a coolheaded and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. At a local poetry performance one night, she meets a well-known photographer, and Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older women’s sophisticated home and handsome husband, Nick. But however amusing Frances and Nick’s flirtation seems at first, it begins to give way to a strange—and then painful—intimacy.

Belly measures her life in summers. Everything is good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August. Winters are simply a time to count down the weeks until summer, and the weeks spent away from Jeremiah and Conrad. They are the boys that Belly has known since her very first summer. But one summer, one wonderful and terrible summer, everything changes and ends up just the way it should have been all along.

Rotterham Home was a hospice for young people. Every night at twelve, a group of five young kids at the hospice came together. They called themselves the Midnight Club, and they would take turns telling each other stories. But one night, in the middle of a particularly scary story, the five kids make a pact with each other. The first one who dies is to make every effort to contact the others from beyond the grave. Then one of them does die, and the story begins.

 This story is one of two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German occupied, war-torn France. This heartbreakingly beautiful novel illuminates the women’s war, a part of history we seldom see, and celebrates the resilience of the human spirt and the durability of women.

Wendy has long heard the family legend—madness strikes the Darling women, traditionally after romance visits in the form of an overgrown boy. The Darling girl will fall in love, the boy will desert, and the girl is left flirting with lunacy’s lure. Wendy wants to be grateful for her childhood adventure, but instead she is lost and consumed by the mystery of her grandmother Jane, whose disappearance following her own romance remains unsolved.

Halloween, 1963. They call him the October Boy, and everybody in this small Midwestern town knows who he is. How he rises from the cornfields every Halloween, a butcher knife in his hand, and makes his way toward town, where gangs of teenage boys eagerly await their chance to confront the legendary nightmare. Both the hunter and the hunted, the October Boy is the prize in an annual rite of life and death.

Check Out These Nonfiction Reads for a Glowing Garden

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With a little creativity and effort, you can have a gorgeous garden for next-to-nothing. Included is a substantial plant directory of more than 100 plants that will multiply and make more plants without any help from you at all. Each entry in the plant directory includes a photo of the plant, its optimum soil, shade, its planting requirements and strategies for propagation.

Plans are provided for built-in, portable planters, window and porch boxes, and more, along with tips on how to convert barrels, buckets, and baskets into unique planters. See how to create spectacular hanging, suspended, barrier and seating wall gardens, and how to make raised beds for special application as handicapped and easy-access gardens.

A guide to planning and planting a beautiful, bountiful garden includes all-organic, low-work techniques for building healthy soil and hundreds of ideas for easy-care plants and gardens in a “tips” format that is easy to follow. This is the ideal book for the lazy, overly busy, or physically restricted gardeners.

Smith’s legendary high-yield gardening method emphasizes wide rows, organic methods, raised beds, and deep soil. Try new and unusual varieties, and learn how to innovatively extend your growing season. With thorough profiles of hundreds of popular varieties, this book provides expert information and an inspiring roadmap for gardeners of all skill levels to enjoy abundant homegrown vegetables.

Drawing on her experiences gardening in Australia and the U.K., Marylyn Abbott explains how to use light to bring a flower bed or border to life, through simple observation of the light patterns and sky colors on a garden and clever mixing of varieties. Watch as she explores the vastly different quality of the gentle English light and the harsh Australian light.

Not everyone has a garden–but with only a handful of materials and a little bit of time, everyone can bring the beauty of nature into their home. Plant Craft features projects inspired by the natural world and made out of live plants, cut flowers, foraged branches, and more. You’ll learn how to create a colorful floral mural, an elegant table centerpiece, a serene underwater sculpture, a whimsical mobile, and more.

Gardening is a rewarding hobby. And one that can produce you substantially more crop if done correctly. Using innovative gardening methods such as hydroponics or greenhouse gardening can help your plants mature 25% faster while delivering a 30% increase in yield. If you want to taste the pleasure of your homegrown food, this book is for you.

Are you interested in creating a bountiful garden but worried that you don’t have enough space? Raised-Bed Gardening for Beginners shows you how simple it can be to plan, build, and grow your own raised-bed garden in whatever space is available. Learn to build your bed, select the right plants, grow your own vegetables, and much more.

Just as stylish accessories bring a room to life, gorgeous planted containers are the finishing touch for every garden home. With this book, P. Allen Smith, shows how to create a beautiful container garden in a matter of minutes, in an innovative recipe-style format complete with ingredients lists, step-by-step planting instructions, and advice on how to effectively display these colorful accents.

Pack your Suitcase and Grab your Passport: Summer Getaways Lost in the Stacks

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Single mom Amy Byler needs a break. So when the guilt-ridden husband who abandoned her shows up and offers to take care of their kids for the summer, she accepts his offer and escapes to New York City. Usually mild mannered, Amy finally lets her hair down in the city that never sleeps. But as the summer draws to an end, Amy realizes too late that she must make an impossible decision: stay in this exciting new chapter of her life, or return to the life she left behind.

Rachel and Jack. Paige and Noah. And Will. Five friends who’ve known each other for years. Then along came Ali, Will’s new fiancée. The three couples travel to Portugal for Ali and Will’s destination wedding. And things seem great until Rachel discovers a shocking secret about Ali that changes everything. As the weekend unfolds, the secrets each of them holds begin to spill, and friendships and marriages threaten to unravel.

Alex and Poppy have nothing in common but somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are still best friends. That is until two years ago, when they ruined everything. They haven’t spoken since but Poppy decides to convince Alex to take one more vacation together—to lay everything on the table, and make it all right. Miraculously, he agrees. And now she has one week to fix everything. What could possibly go wrong?

Two parents in Washington State are bound by tragedy when their sons were involved in a murder-suicide. Separated by only a silvery stretch of trees, the two parents are emotionally stranded, and isolated by their great losses. Then a mysterious pregnant girl emerges out of the woods and into the lives of those same boys’ families, bridging the gap and changing everything.

 Erin and Mark couldn’t be happier when they set off to Bora Bora for their honeymoon. Things quickly changed, however, when they spot something suspicious in the water while scuba diving. Could the life of your dreams be the stuff of nightmares? Suddenly the newlyweds must make a dangerous choice to speak out about what they’ve seen or protect their secret. 

Anna is spending the summer in the Hamptons as a nanny, in a community on edge after the disappearance of Zoe Spanos. Anna, who is constantly reminded of her resemblance to Zoe, begins to dig deeper into the unsolved case. Two months later, she finds herself charged with the manslaughter of a girl she’d never met. Did Anna really kill Zoe?

Lina is spending a summer in Tuscany, but she isn’t in the mood for Italy’s famous sunshine and fairy-tale landscape. She’s only there because it was her mother’s dying wish for her to get to know her father. Her focus shifts when she is given her mother’s journal and discovers long hidden secrets with the help of a charming local boy. “People come to Italy for love and gelato,” someone tells her, but sometimes they discover so much more.

Six years after the fight that ended their friendship, Daphne is shocked when Drue walks back into her life with a massive favor to ask. Daphne hasn’t spoken a word to Drue, so she’s rightfully speechless when Drue asks her to be her maid-of-honor at her wedding. Letting glamourous Drue back into her life is risky, but it comes with an invitation to spend a weekend at a waterfront Cape Cod mansion and Daphne finds herself powerless as ever to resist.

Everyone imagines running away from their life at some point. But Birdy has actually done it. And the life she’s run into is her best friend Heather’s. The only problem is, she hasn’t told Heather. The summer job at the highland Scottish hotel that her world class wine-expert friend ditched turns out to be a lot more than Birdy bargained for. Can she survive a summer pretending to be her best friend?