Celia's Eyes


Book Description

Celia Anzalone has lived anything from a boring life. In the center of a messy divorce as a child to extreme drug problems as a young adult, Celia recounts her life as a drug addict. Recovery may be a long road, but with the help of God Celia is able to find balance in her life, while letting go of the past and accepting who she is now. Not leaving anything out, Celia tells the bizarre-and at times, embarrassing-story that was her life-stolen cars, abusive boyfriends, forgotten friends, and much more. She may have lived more than a difficult life, but finding God allowed Celia to forgive herself for mistakes she has made and accept the young person she's become. This whirlwind journey is bound to inspire readers as she weaves in and out of memories of a past life in this tantalizing memoir. Celia's Eyes is an inspiring story that shows how one girl, with all the odds against her, can turn them in her favor, building a new life from the ground up. She doesn't hide anything in this thought-provoking story of hitting rock bottom again and again, to finally get up for once and for all.




The Night Circus


Book Description

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Two starcrossed magicians engage in a deadly game of cunning in the spellbinding novel that captured the world's imagination. • "Part love story, part fable ... defies both genres and expectations." —The Boston Globe The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway: a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them both, this is a game in which only one can be left standing. Despite the high stakes, Celia and Marco soon tumble headfirst into love, setting off a domino effect of dangerous consequences, and leaving the lives of everyone, from the performers to the patrons, hanging in the balance.




Dreaming in Cuban


Book Description

“Impressive . . . [Cristina García’s] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny Moré.”—Time Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban “Remarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.”—The Washington Post “Brilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, García just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”—The Denver Post




Celia Garth


Book Description

This New York Times bestseller set during the American Revolution is “an exciting tale of love and war in the tradition of Gone with the Wind” (Chicago Tribune). A bustling port city, Charleston, South Carolina, is the crossroads of the American Revolution, supplies and weapons for the rebel army being unloaded there and then smuggled north. Recently engaged to the heir to a magnificent plantation, Celia Garth watches all of this thrilling activity from the window of the dressmaker’s shop where she works. When the unthinkable occurs and the British capture and occupy Charleston, bringing fiery retribution to the surrounding countryside, Celia sees her world destroyed. The rebel cause seems lost until the Swamp Fox, American General Francis Marion, takes the fight to the British—and one of his daring young soldiers recruits Celia to spy on the rebels’ behalf. Out of the ashes of Charleston and the Carolina countryside will rise a new nation—and a love that will change Celia Garth forever.




We Need to Talk About Kevin


Book Description

The inspiration for the film starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, this resonant story of a mother’s unsettling quest to understand her teenage son’s deadly violence, her own ambivalence toward motherhood, and the explosive link between them remains terrifyingly prescient. Eva never really wanted to be a mother. And certainly not the mother of a boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much–adored teacher in a school shooting two days before his sixteenth birthday. Neither nature nor nurture exclusively shapes a child's character. But Eva was always uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood. Did her internalized dislike for her own son shape him into the killer he’s become? How much is her fault? Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with Kevin’s horrific rampage, all in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin. A piercing, unforgettable, and penetrating exploration of violence and responsibility, a book that the Boston Globe describes as “impossible to put down,” is a stunning examination of how tragedy affects a town, a marriage, and a family.




Celia's Song


Book Description

Mink is a witness, a shape shifter, compelled to follow the story that has ensnared Celia and her village, on the West coast of Vancouver Island in Nuu’Chahlnuth territory. Celia is a seer who — despite being convinced she’s a little “off” — must heal her village with the assistance of her sister, her mother and father, and her nephews. While mink is visiting, a double-headed sea serpent falls off the house front during a fierce storm. The old snake, ostracized from the village decades earlier, has left his terrible influence on Amos, a residential school survivor. The occurrence signals the unfolding of an ordeal that pulls Celia out of her reveries and into the tragedy of her cousin’s granddaughter. Each one of Celia’s family becomes involved in creating a greater solution than merely attending to her cousin’s granddaughter. Celia’s Song relates one Nuu’Chahlnuth family’s harrowing experiences over several generations, after the brutality, interference, and neglect resulting from contact with Europeans.




Self-Portrait


Book Description

A rich, penetrating memoir about the author's relationship with a flawed but influential figure—the painter Lucian Freud—and the satisfactions and struggles of a life lived through art. One of Britain's most important contemporary painters, Celia Paul has written a reflective, intimate memoir of her life as an artist. Self-Portrait tells the artist's story in her own words, drawn from early journal entries as well as memory, of her childhood in India and her days as a art student at London's Slade School of Fine Art; of her intense decades-long relationship with the older esteemed painter Lucian Freud and the birth of their son; of the challenges of motherhood, the unresolvable conflict between caring for a child and remaining commited to art; of the "invisible skeins between people," the profound familial connections Paul communicates through her paintings of her mother and sisters; and finally, of the mystical presence in her own solitary vision of the world around her. Self-Portrait is a powerful, liberating evocation of a life and of a life-long dedication to art.





Book Description




The Poet's Eye


Book Description

Existential questions inspired by everyday details. In this conscientious collection the poet steps beyond the veil in her quest to embrace both the light and dark sides of life. With poignancy and insight, her voice rings out through the words she left behind, finding humour, wonderment and hope alive in a tumultuous and ineffable world.