A Small Crowd of Strangers


Book Description

Marrying the wrong man is easier than leaving him. How does a librarian from New Jersey end up in a convenience store on Vancouver Island in the middle of the night, playing Bible Scrabble with a Korean physicist and a drunk priest? She gets married to the wrong man for starters—she didn't know he was 'that kind of Catholic'—and ends up in St. Cloud, Minnesota. She gets a job in a New Age bookstore, wanders toward Buddhism without realizing it, and acquires a dog. Things get complicated after that. Pattianne Anthony is less a thinker than a dreamer, and she finds out the hard way that she doesn't want a husband, much less a baby, and that getting out of a marriage is a lot harder than getting into it, especially when the landscape of the west becomes the voice of reason. A Small Crowd of Strangers, Joanna Rose’s second novel, is part love story, part slightly sideways spiritual journey.




The Care of Strangers


Book Description

Winner of the 2019 Miami Book Fair/de Groot Prize, The Care of Strangers is a moving story about friendship set in a gritty Brooklyn hospital, where a young woman learns to take charge of her life by taking care of others. Working as an orderly in a gritty Brooklyn public hospital, Sima is often reminded by her superiors that she's the least important person there. An immigrant who, with her mother, escaped vicious anti-Semitism in Poland, she spends her shifts transporting patients, observing the doctors and residents ... and quietly nurturing her aspirations to become a doctor herself by going to night school. Now just one credit short of graduating, she finds herself faltering in the face of pressure from her mother not to overreach, and to settle for the life she has now. Everything changes when Sima encounters Mindy Kahn, an intern doctor struggling through her residency. Sensing a fellow outsider in need of support, Sima bonds with Mindy over their patients, and learns the power of truly letting yourself care for another person, helping to give her the courage to face her past, and take control of her future. A moving story about vulnerability and friendship, The Care of Strangers is the story of one woman's discovery that sometimes interactions with strangers are the best way to find yourself.




The Book of Strangers


Book Description

Sometime in the future the head librarian at a great center of learning suddenly disappears, leaving behind a journal that describes his weariness with a world "where people teach but know nothing, where the sentences flow on endlessly but lead nowhere." His successor in the post becomes more and more intrigued by the vanished man's fate, until a series of mysterious clues lead him on a journey both inward and outward, to a world that begins where language ends. Within a matter of weeks he finds himself in the company of powerful dervishes, God-intoxicated nomads whose eyes blaze with love, and ragged beggars with the smile of the Pure One. These men, the followers of an enlightened Shaykh, speak little, but simply to be in their company fills him with ecstasy and knowledge.




All These Beautiful Strangers


Book Description

"This is going to be big." -Entertainment Weekly “Juicy, clever, and beguiling." -Cecily von Ziegsar, author of the Gossip Girl novels A young woman haunted by a family tragedy is caught up in a dangerous web of lies and deception involving a secret society in this highly charged, addictive psychological thriller that combines the dishy gamesmanship of Gossip Girl with the murky atmosphere of The Secret History. One summer day, Grace Fairchild, the beautiful young wife of real estate mogul Alistair Calloway, vanished from the family’s lake house without a trace, leaving behind her seven-year old daughter, Charlie, and a slew of unanswered questions. Years later, seventeen-year-old Charlie still struggles with the dark legacy of her family name and the mystery surrounding her mother. Determined to finally let go of the past, she throws herself into life at Knollwood, the prestigious New England school she attends. Charlie quickly becomes friends with Knollwood’s "it" crowd. Charlie has also been tapped by the A’s—the school’s elite secret society well known for terrorizing the faculty, administration, and their enemies. To become a member of the A’s, Charlie must play The Game, a semester-long, diabolical high-stakes scavenger hunt that will jeopardize her friendships, her reputation, even her place at Knollwood. As the dark events of past and present converge, Charlie begins to fear that she may not survive the terrible truth about her family, her school, and her own life.




People We Meet on Vacation


Book Description

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Book Lovers and Beach Read comes a sparkling novel that will leave you with the warm, hazy afterglow usually reserved for the best vacations. Two best friends. Ten summer trips. One last chance to fall in love. Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She’s a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she’s in New York City, and he’s in their small hometown—but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together. Until two years ago, when they ruined everything. They haven't spoken since. Poppy has everything she should want, but she’s stuck in a rut. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, she knows, without a doubt, it was on that ill-fated, final trip with Alex. And so, she decides to convince her best friend to take one more vacation together—lay everything on the table, make it all right. Miraculously, he agrees. Now she has a week to fix everything. If only she can get around the one big truth that has always stood quietly in the middle of their seemingly perfect relationship. What could possibly go wrong? Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Newsweek ∙ Oprah Magazine ∙ The Skimm ∙ Marie Claire ∙ Parade ∙ The Wall Street Journal ∙ Chicago Tribune ∙ PopSugar ∙ BookPage ∙ BookBub ∙ Betches ∙ SheReads ∙ Good Housekeeping ∙ BuzzFeed ∙ Business Insider ∙ Real Simple ∙ Frolic ∙ and more!




Round the Bend


Book Description

Round the Bend follows the life of Tom Cutter, an Englishman who becomes a pilot and settles in the Middle East after World War II. Tom starts an air freight business and becomes fascinated by the spiritual beliefs of the local Muslim population, which leads him to start his own religion called "The Way." Through his travels and teachings, Tom attracts a group of devoted followers and becomes a spiritual leader. However, his unconventional beliefs and practices lead to conflict with some of the more traditional religious and political authorities in the region. Despite the challenges he faces, Tom remains committed to his beliefs and the pursuit of a more peaceful and harmonious world. The novel explores themes of religion, spirituality, cultural differences, and the clash between tradition and modernity.




Testing the Troll


Book Description

mock me. Ximena’s visions of the future have helped her achieve fabulous wealth, but her mind cannot handle the strain. She hides in her remote home, living like a hermit in the hopes of not having any more of the dooming visions that push her to the brink. When her friend Andromeda tells her that she is needed to save magic, she’s not sure that she can help. All she sees is doom. Martellus is a troll, a member of a dying breed. There are only ten trolls remaining in Dream, and no matter their power, their only hope for the future is finding compatible humans in the hope that something of their kind will be preserved. Equally important, at least to Martellus, is vengeance on those who trapped them in Dream at the start. Preserving all the races will spite them, and the woman the service matches him with can provide the power and wealth needed to do so, if she can be freed from the chains of her uncontrolled gift. Both goals align, at least at this. Martellus has one task: convince Ximena to help them. But if she does, will it be to help his kind, or love of Martellus himself?




Keppelberg


Book Description

An ex-soldier living in Cornwall gets an invitation to his sister's house in the north of England. He drives there but loses his way and ends up at a remote place called Keppelberg. It appears to be very strange to him, being set in Victorian times, and he is unjustly asked to leave by the police. He continues his journey to his sister but he remains curious about Keppelberg and goes back to find out more about it. The inhabitants do not make him welcome and he is incarcerated in jail. However he escapes to undertake his own investigation and what he discovers both astonishes and shocks him. For example, why are there no old people living in Keppelberg?




Fat Boy


Book Description

** 2020 Foreword INDIES Gold Award Winner ** The innocence of a child can sometimes be mistaken. Way out west, in the tumbling greens of England, something's going down... "Fat Boy" is a treacherously fictitious rhapsody, taking a tongue-in-cheek look at the best and the worst of humanity and treating it with the disrespect it deserves - love and hate, corruption and extortion, car chases, gunfights and high jinks, all set against the green and pleasant landscapes of the English countryside. It's a circus - a raucous ride into the unknown. "Fat Boy really was something else; refreshing, different and quintessentially British. I will certainly be following this author with some interest in the future." - Grant Leishman, Readers’ Favorite "The best thing about this book is the descriptions the author employs to create character and scene. It is so scrumptious that I found myself lost in its delicacy and sad when it had gone." - Nicole Howard, Writer's Digest




A Journey Through Stories


Book Description

Are you about to embark on a journey, maybe by air, bus, or my favourite, the Railways? If so, pause a while and carry this book along with you. Even as you journey forth to your destination, these stories will become your travel companion, traversing with you across both real and imagined territories. This is after all why this book is fittingly titled, A Journey Through Stories. Here you will find a bouquet of micro-short stories, 50 of them that cover a wide genre of stories, such as science fiction, essay, autobiography, mythology, humour, travelogue, and plain fantasy. It is influenced by literary lovers of the short and concise prose such as R K Narayan, O Henry, Asimov, Moravia, Guy de Maupassant, and Somerset Maugham. Written in a lucid, crisp, yet simple and accessible style, this book is a quick and engaging read, leaving you yearning to hasten from the landscape of one story to the next. For who knows, dear reader, what the next story around the bend is all about.