Life Age

Crystal learned long ago that love brings only pain. Feeling nothing at all is far better than being hurt again. She guards her wounded heart behind a hard exterior and carries within her a deep mistrust of men, who, in her experience, have only ever used and taken. Then Gabriel Dalton walks into her life. Despite the terrible darkness of his past, there's an undeniable goodness in him. And even though she knows the cost, Crystal finds herself drawn to Gabriel.

On the eve of her wedding to Adam, Lily’s best friend Josh unexpectedly walked out of her life, and she hasn’t seen him since. Lily and Adam are blissfully happy, until he falls ill. As she cares for him in his final hours, Adam asks her to make a mysterious promise: to find Josh—and forgive them both.

Anuri Chinasa has had enough. And really, who can blame her? She was the unwilling star of her stepmother’s social media empire before “momfluencers” were even a thing. For years, Ophelia documented every birthday, every skinned knee, every milestone and meltdown for millions of strangers to fawn over and pick apart. Now, at twenty-five, Anuri is desperate to put her way-too-public past behind her and start living on her own terms.

In God Don't Like Ugly, she weaves a powerful tale of devastating abuse, the strength of friendship, and the burden of terrible secrets. Shy, overweight Annette Goode is only seven years old when Mr. Boatwright, a boarder in her house, begins sexually abusing her. She keeps this information to herself for years, until gorgeous, self-assured Rhoda Nelson becomes her new friend. Annette confides in Rhoda and finds the strength and courage to survive to adulthood.

Life in a Medieval Village, by respected historians Joseph and Frances Gies, paints a lively, convincing portrait of rural people at work and at play in the Middle Ages. Focusing on the village of Elton, in the English East Midlands, the Gieses detail the agricultural advances that made communal living possible, explain what domestic life was like for serf and lord alike, and describe the central role of the church in maintaining social harmony.

Gilles, vingt-neuf ans, se retrouve amoché dans le Montréal d’après la pandémie : il a perdu son travail de guide touristique, sa copine et son logement. En désespoir de cause, il se réfugie chez son grand-père Henri, qui possède une ferme en Estrie. Très réticent au départ, le citadin prendra peu à peu goût à la vie à la campagne et à la tâche quotidienne que lui confie son grand-père : promener les chèvres. Cet été-là, une flopée de personnages venus d’un peu partout voudront faire route avec cet étrange promeneur de chèvres.

One unbearable mistake at the edge of the forest. In a moment of crisis, Ellis Abbey leaves her daughter, Viola, unattended - for just a few minutes. But when she returns, Viola is gone. A breaking point in an already fractured marriage, Viola’s abduction causes Ellis to disappear as well - into grief, guilt, and addiction. Convinced she can only do more harm to her family, Ellis leaves her husband and young sons, burying her desperate ache for her children deeper with every step into the mountain wildernesses she treks alone.

In A Kid from Marlboro Road, past and present intermingle as family stories are told and retold. The narrative careens between the prior generation’s colorful sojourns in the Bronx and Hell’s Kitchen and the softer world of Gibson, the town on Long Island where they live now. There are scenes in the Rockaways, at Belmont racetrack, and in Montauk. Edward Burns’s buoyant first novel is a bildungsroman, yet out of one boy’s story a collective warmth emerges, a certain kind of American tale, raucous and joyous.

Mary Rose MacKinnon is a successful author of YA fiction doing a tour of duty as stay-at-home mom while her partner Hilary takes a turn focusing on her career. She tries valiantly to balance the (mostly) solo parenting of two young children with the relentless needs of her aging parents. But amid the hilarities of full-on domesticity arises a sense of dread. Do others notice the dents in the expensive refrigerator?

The folks in the Kentucky Appalachians are scraping by. Coal mining and hardscrabble know-how are a way of life for these isolated people. But when Amanda Rye, a young widowed mother and traveling packhorse librarian, comes through a mountain community hit hard by the nation’s economic collapse, she brings with her hope, courage, and apple pie.

Nell Stevens’ life is a mess. When her business goes bust and her fiancé with it, Nell’s happy ever after in California falls apart and she moves back to London to start over. But a lot has changed since she’s been gone. All her single friends are now married with children, sky-high rents force her to rent a room in a stranger’s house and in a world of perfect Instagram lives, she feels like a f--k up.

Our society tells us over and over that if we're going to achieve anything, we'd better do it while we're young. But whether you're at the start of your career, sensing you're on the wrong path, or feeling unsettled later in life, you're likely wondering just how to reinvent yourself? Have you left it too late? This book has answers. Late bloomers - individuals who experience significant success later in life - offer lessons for people who feel frustrated.

When all the fish vanish from the waters and the cod industry abruptly collapses, it's not long before the residents are forced to leave the island in search of work, and 10-year-old Finn Connor suddenly finds himself living in a ghost town. There's no school, no friends, and whole rows of houses stand abandoned. Then, Finn's parents announce that they must separate if their family is to survive. But Finn still has his sister, with whom he counts the dwindling boats on the coast at night, and Mrs. Callaghan, who teaches him the strange and ancient melodies of their native Ireland.

In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful yet blisteringly harsh islands that her hardscrabble family has called home for generations.

Quiet Funke is happy in Nigeria. She loves her art teacher mother, her professor father, and even her annoying little brother (most of the time). But when tragedy strikes, she’s sent to England, a place she knows only from her mother’s stories. To her dismay, she finds the much-lauded estate dilapidated, the food tasteless, the weather grey. Worse still, her mother’s family are cold and distant. With one exception: her cousin Liv.

A fascinating new portrait of Medieval Britain that brings together the everyday and the extraordinary. Using wide-ranging evidence, Martyn Whittock shines a light on Britain in the Middle Ages, bringing it vividly to life. Thus we glimpse 11th century rural society through a conversation between a ploughman and his master. The life of Dick Whittington illuminates the rise of the urban elite.

This stunning debut - like The Lovely Bones - is a child's story narrated from the afterlife, and an emotional fable about love, forgiveness, and what most makes us human. With prose that is rich in emotion - from laughter to tears to outrage to joyful relief - and an eloquence that distills poetry from the language of medicine and the words for ordinary things, Raoul Wientzen has delivered a novel of rare beauty that speaks to subjects as profound as faith, what makes us human, and the value of a life.

Ellis and Michael are 12-year-old boys when they first become friends, and for a long time, it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of overbearing fathers. And then one day, this closest of friendships grows into something more. But then, we fast-forward a decade or so to find that Ellis is married to Annie, and Michael is nowhere in sight. Which leads to the question: What happened in the years between?

In 1979, Vincent Bianco has just graduated high school. His only desire: collect a little beer money and enjoy his final summer before college. So he lands a job as a laborer on a construction crew. Working alongside two Vietnam vets, one suffering from PTSD, Vincent gets the education of a lifetime. Now forty years later, with his own son leaving for college, the lessons of that summer - Vincent’s last taste of innocence and first taste of real life - dramatically unfold in a novel about breaking away, shaping a life, and seeking one’s own destiny.

All is well until the Whitmans - an apparently traditional family with new money and a secretly troubled teenaged daughter - raze the house and trees next door to build themselves a showplace. With little in common except a property line, these two very different families quickly find themselves at odds: First, over an historic oak tree in Valerie's yard, and soon after, the blossoming romance between their two teenagers.