Showing titles in Sports

Holly Vanderbuilt is running. From her past, her present, her future - everything. Baking is her only solace. Cookies, cakes, ingredients coming together, they make sense. A professional fighter walking into her kitchen? Not so much. Vince Steele is focused on his future. The next fight. The next win. Nothing else matters except feeling the weight of the Light Heavyweight belt around his waist. Until Holly. He has what it takes to win the belt. But will Holly’s past prove to be an opponent he can’t beat? He’s never backed down from a fight.

Jace Sinclair here, and I'm amazing. There is no other way to describe me. I am the leading scorer for the Bellevue Bullies, I'm the captain, and people love me: my family, my teammates, my coach, and the NHL. This is my last year in college - I already have one foot in the draft. Hockey keeps me warm even when it's freezing. It's always there when nothing else is. And it pushes me to be the best I can be. It's my one and only love. That is, until I see her against a tree with a guitar. Avery.

Charley Hunter unearthed the life and career of the greatest player who never lived, and then spent years successfully attempting to bring Beau Stedman's story to light. His actions did not go unnoticed. Now, it is time for Charley to put the whole experience behind him . . . pass the bar, learn the ropes at the new firm, and settle into a promising legal career. But he's been receiving these intriguing notes attached to clipped obituaries that have caught hold of his curiousity.

A year ago Travis McKinley, an unknown golfing amateur, shocked the world by winning the PGA Senior Open at Pebble Beach. Now he's famous, he makes his living playing the game he loves, and everything should be perfect. Still Travis can't shake the feeling that he's a fraud, an imposter who doesn't deserve his success - and after a series of disappointments and, to be honest, personal screwups, he might just prove himself right.

Butterfly Winter, W.P. Kinsella's first novel in 15 years, is the story of Julio and Esteban Pimental, twins born in the Caribbean country of Courteguay, a lush and enchanted but impoverished enclave on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic where time moves at its own pace and reality is open to question. The brothers are destined to play ball in America, and to shape the history of their baseball-crazed homeland. They mature quickly and by the age of 10 they leave home for the Major Leagues.

Highlights in this set include "The Night Manny Mota Tied the Record", "The Battery", and "The Thrill of the Grass". In a plot that preceded anything written by Mitch Albom, "The Night Manny Mota Tied the Record" explores the feelings after the death of Yankee catcher Thurmon Munson. Would a hardcore (non-Yankee) baseball fan give his life to save Munson's? "The Battery" takes readers to Santo Domingo where a wizard created in the vein of author Terry Pratchett sees the birth of baseball playing twins.

It is 1952, and nearly all the girls 16-year-old Bertha Harding knows dream of getting married, keeping house, and raising children in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan. Bertha dreams of baseball. She reads every story in the sports section, she plays ball with the neighborhood boys—she even writes letters to the pitcher for the Workington Sweet Peas, part of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.

Chuck didn't expect to be retired by the time he was thirty. That was just how life had worked out. He'd had his fair share of adventures, put together a decent bankroll while working in the oil fields of northern Canada, and escaped with an injury that hadn't crippled him too badly. All he wants is to build a bit more money before buying himself a secluded cottage and deciding how to fulfill the rest of his life.

Dana Campbell has spent the past seven years in self-imposed isolation for a crime she didn't commit. The danger is well in the past, but her panic attacks make it impossible to have a normal, healthy relationship with a man. Even her counselor has given up on her. She has to find someone she trusts to help her fight through the panic, or her seven-year ordeal will become a lifetime sentence. There's only one man she feels safe enough to ask.

"It's one hell of a sledgehammer to the chest when your baseball career comes to an end. It's like you finally realize that baseball never loved you back. All the sleepless nights, the hours spent at the gym trying to stay fit, the conditioning, the training, the mental preparation, the holidays missed, the birthdays passed, the memories you didn't get to make with your family...all for what? It's not like baseball lost any sleep over you."

Goon Girl follows the adventures and misadventures of a young woman navigating her career through the fictional South Saskatchewan Minor Female Hockey League. Rich with comedy, teamwork, and lessons about growing up, Goon Girl is as Canadian a book as it gets.

Like Foxcatcher meets The Art of Fielding, Stephen Florida follows a college wrestler in his senior season, when every practice, every match, is a step closer to greatness and a step further from sanity. Profane, manic, and tipping into the uncanny, Stephen Florida a story of loneliness, obsession, and the drive to leave a mark.

"Courir est mon plaisir. Une échappée belle à portée de jambes. Courir est un besoin. Une bulle qui suspend la vie. Courir offre une liberté insolente. Une ligne de fuite. Mais courir peut rendre prisonnier. Moi, courir m'a sauvé."

Maverick "The Avenger" Cage wants to rise to the top and become a legend in the ring. Though he keeps his identity well guarded, he's known on the fighting circuit as the new kid with a chip on his shoulder and a tattoo on his back that marks him as trouble. He's got a personal score to settle with the Underground's one and only Remington "Riptide" Tate.

I’ve been texting the wife I lost, the woman I loved beyond measure.... Now someone else has answered back. Gunnar Bond is broken. Three years ago, he lived through the car crash that took his wife and twins away from him - though “lived” barely describes his current state. Giving up professional hockey, going off-grid, and drinking himself into oblivion are his coping mechanisms. Another is texting his dead wife about his days without her. Therapeutic? Doubtful. Crazy? Definitely.

Leinster House had been burned to the ground. All that was left was a smouldering ruin and the blackened remains of an Irish flag. The old man was trying to pin the blame on Brussels, but I knew the actual truth? Unfortunately, Sorcha was too angry with me for having sex with our daughter's Irish teacher to listen. But I had, like, other irons in the—pardon the pun—fire. I'd just become Head Coach of the Ireland rugby team—albeit, women. The country might well have been focked. But very soon, we had everyone believing in fairy tales again.

Inside the Octagon, I have no fear. I'm at home, in my element, inflicting pain onto men trained to hurt me just as badly. Making them submit, knocking them out, maiming them, because it's them or me. And I choose them.

Gil Gamesh, the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire. The ex-con first baseman, John Baal, “The Babe Ruth of the Big House,” who never hit a home run sober. If you’ve never heard of them—or of the homeless baseball team the Ruppert Mundys—it’s because of the Communist plot, and the capitalist scandal, that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory.

Horace Hopper is a half-Paiute, half-Irish ranch hand who wants to be somebody. He's spent most of his life on the ranch of his kindly guardians, Mr. and Mrs. Reese, herding sheep alone in the mountains. But while the Reeses treat him like a son, Horace can't shake the shame he feels from being abandoned by his parents. He decides to leave the only loving home he's known to prove his worth by training to become a boxer.

Frank Ewert's disarming collection of short fiction starts off with an inside view of small-time, big identity Canadian hockey, its meaning, its plays, its lingo. But each story's distinct voice quickly reveals universal themes of rivalry, calling, discipline, infatuation, and national dignity that invite every reader to be more than a spectator. The characters have keen direction and surprising priorities that open this unknown world to the uninitiated.