Life Age

One September afternoon in 1999, teenagers Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan Lang are walking home from school when they discover a boy lying in a field, bloody and unconscious. Thanks to their intervention, the boy’s life is saved. In the aftermath, all three siblings are irrevocably changed. Matthew, the oldest, becomes obsessed with tracking down the assailant, secretly searching the local town with the victim’s brother. Zoe wanders the streets of Oxford, looking at men, and one of them, a visiting American graduate student, looks back.

God is born in human form. Ultimate power and authority reside in the hands of a child. Early Christians looked at their own children as they played, argued, loved, and fought and wondered what it would have been like to raise the son of God. How would Jesus have acted as a baby, a toddler, a child, or a teenager? How human was this “God-child,” Jesus? Did he have the failings of their own children? Was he selfish and rash at the age of one? Was his stage of the “terrible twos” as horrible a stage as most? If Jesus were a normal youngster what would the outcome have been?

After his daughter, Avery, was born, John gave it all up—hobbies, friends, a dream job—to be something more: a super dad. Since then, he’s spent nearly every waking second with Avery, who’s his absolute best bud. Or, at least, she was. When now eleven-year-old Avery begins transforming into an eye-rolling zombie of a preteen who dreads spending time with him, a desperate John whisks her away for a weeklong father-daughter retreat to get their relationship back on track before she starts middle school.

In Age Is Just a Number, Dara Torres reveals how the dream of an Olympic comeback first came to her when she was months into her first, hard-won pregnancy. With humor and candor, Dara recounts how she returned to serious training while nursing her infant daughter and contending with her beloved father's long battle with cancer. A truly self-made legend, her story will resonate with women of all ages and with anyone daring to entertain a seemingly impossible dream.

Running Toward Mystery is the Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi's profound account of his lifelong journey as a seeker. At its heart is a story of striving for enlightenment, the vital importance of mentors in that search, and of the many remarkable teachers he met along the way, among them the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Mother Teresa.

Sophie Shah was six when she learned her mother, Nita, had died. For twenty-two years, she shouldered the burden of that loss. But when her father passes away, Sophie discovers a cache of hidden letters revealing a shattering truth: her mother didn’t die. She left.

Your Teenage Years Are Over (or Almost), Now What? Life Skills for Young Adults is an essential roadmap for young adults, older teens, and high school and college students navigating the challenging passage into independence. In this book, developing young adults will discover strategies for harnessing what can feel like a rollercoaster of unsettled emotions, while nurturing self-confidence, establishing autonomy, and investing in personal growth during this dynamic life stage.

The set-up of Mark Haddon's brilliant new novel is simple: Richard, a wealthy doctor, invites his estranged sister Angela and her family to join his for a week at a vacation home in the English countryside. Richard has just re-married and inherited a willful stepdaughter in the process; Angela has a feckless husband and three children who sometimes seem alien to her. The stage is set for seven days of resentment and guilt, a staple of family gatherings the world over.

For young couple Taz and Marnie, their fixer-upper is the symbol of their new life together: a work in progress, the beginning of something grand, all the more so when they learn that a baby is on the way. But the blueprint for the perfect life eludes Taz when Marnie dies in childbirth, plummeting the taciturn carpenter headfirst into the new, strange world of fatherhood alone, a landscape of contradictions, of great joy and sorrow.

You go to wake up your eighteen-year-old son on Sunday morning for church and you find him dead in his bed. Only later do you learn he bought a single Xanax pill on Snapchat for fifteen dollars to calm his anxiety about the COVID-19 pandemic. He took the pill then ordered food from Door Dash, but he never lived to eat it. It was a counterfeit pill that contained over three times the lethal dose of fentanyl—that one pill killed him.

Kim Kincaid can’t catch a break. She has a thankless job at a law office, a nasty co-worker, and a boyfriend allergic to genuine commitment. Meanwhile, her older sister, Dena, skates through life with a perfect husband, a perfect job, even a perfect daughter. Kim grits her teeth through their every phone call, counting the minutes until she can disappear into a drink or TV (preferably both). She doesn’t recall agreeing to babysit her niece. She only remembers Dena bragging about yet another romantic getaway.

As the long, mysterious life of a family matriarch begins to wind down, will she take her secrets with her? Or will her past adventures lead to new ones for the next generation? From a bustling Australian city to the beauty and promise of Granada and a captivating culture, one young woman may dare to find out....

This is an account of a life lived online. Swiping for approval. Scrolling for gratification. Searching for connection. From the glow of a screen in the middle of the night, to the harsh glare of the hospital waiting room, Validate Me, is a raw and honest look at the highs and the lows of a digital life.

Alice Fivey is seven years old when her father dies, and ten when her mentally fragile mother is institutionalized. So begins the “sleepover life” for Alice. Shuttled among the homes of wealthy relatives, retainers, babysitters, and reluctant caretakers, Alice must learn their habits and adapt if she is to survive. But how is she to remain intact after the loss of her parents, whose troubled pasts are invoked to punish and manipulate her? Books help, as do kindly teachers.

Elsie Weir is trying hard to keep her family together. Living in Kiltie Street tenement in Glasgow with her mother and little sister, Jessie, isn't easy - not least because her mother spends most days in a drunken stupor. But life gets harder still when their mother dies suddenly, leaving Jessie and Elsie broken-hearted. The future looks bleak, until their mother's estranged family deigns to take them in. But their relief is short-lived as it becomes clear the Mearns family have taken in the orphan sisters only for appearances, treating them cruelly behind closed doors.

Twelve-year-old Harper has been dancing practically since she could walk. She loves her dance studio and team and just won her first ever top junior solo in a regional competition. But right before the school year starts, Harper's parents drop a bombshell - the family has to relocate from their cozy town in Connecticut to sunny Florida for their jobs. That means good-bye to her friends, dance team, trips to see shows in NYC. When she arrives at her new dance school and new team, it feels like everyone has better feet, quicker turns, and faster taps than Harper.

Moses Ben Maimon, frequently called Maimonides, was a medieval philosopher who revolutionized thinking about ethics, reason, and the Jewish Torah through his emphasis on reason and evidence. His works were broadly accepted by the Sephardi Jewish community and spread across the medieval world, reaching the Jewish populations as far as Yemen, and though he lived in the 12th century, Maimonides continues to be one of the most studied scholars of Jewish law, philosophy, and theology.

The unforgettable narrator of this compelling, thought-provoking debut goes by two names in his two worlds. At the university he attends, he’s Gabriel, a seemingly ordinary, partying student learning about morality at a distance. But in his life outside the classroom, he’s Snoopz, a hard-living member of London’s gangs, well-acquainted with drugs, guns, stabbings, and robbery. Navigating these sides of himself, dealing with loving parents at the same time as treacherous, endangering friends and the looming threat of prison, he is forced to come to terms with who he really is.

In this powerful and provocative novel, Blum explores the dark and mysterious link that connects twins Charles and Karena—and how far one will go to protect the other. Karena Jorge has kept a watchful eye on her brother Charles since they were teens. But when he stops taking his medicine and his bipolar disorder worsens, she’s torn between respecting her brother’s choices and fearing for his life.

Every year, the monarch butterflies - las mariposas - fly more than two thousand miles on fragile wings to return to their winter home in Mexico. Now Luz Avila makes that same perilous journey south as she honors a vow to her beloved abuela - the grandmother who raised her - to return her ashes to her ancestral village. As Luz departs Milwaukee in a ramshackle old VW Bug, she finds her heart opened by a series of seemingly random encounters with remarkable women.